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
ideas people made
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
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.
art point-break poetry
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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.
music song memories
Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.