Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet19 December 1910 – 15 April 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he 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...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 December 1910
CountryFrance
want disappear
I don't want to disappear.
language stretching wraps
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
ideas hatred needs
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
lying names giving
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
doing-nothing intimacy fuse
They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.
men evil may
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
flower fragility delicacy
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.
heart hands bags
My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.
night play voice
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.
balls world mouths
I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.
betrayal betrayed ecstasy
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
body adrift cocaine
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
grief book dust
They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.
betrayal pleasure knows
Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.