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
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. – 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
I’m homosexual… How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green. – Jean Genet
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
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
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology. – 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
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty. – 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
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man. – Jean Genet
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all. – Jean Genet
