A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
Jean Genet

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

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
Jean Genet

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet

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

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet

I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
Jean Genet

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
Jean Genet

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.
Jean Genet


The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
Jean Genet

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet

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

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
Jean Genet

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.
Jean Genet

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet

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