Jean Genet Quotes

It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.

Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.