Jean Genet (December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Beware of the night, child. All cats are black in the dark.
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
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.
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
Categories: Jean Genet, Quotes of the day
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