134 Quotes by Jean Genet

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

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.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

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

You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley....

If I can not have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched, not for the purpose of a sterile solitude, but in order to achieve something new with such rare matter.

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

She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings...

It was therefore natural for me to imagine what his penis would be if he smeared it for my benefit with so fine a substance, with that precious cobweb, a tissue which I secretly called the veil of the palace.