Jean Genet Quotes

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.