Jean Genet

“It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.”

“I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty—a sunken beauty.”

“What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.”

“Love has no great fervor in prison.”

“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.”

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

“Worse than not knowing, is not wanting to know.”

“The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, measure it, sound its depths and go down into it.”

“Crimes of which a man is not ashamed can be forgiven.”

“Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but profound solitude.”

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

“There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.”

“Poetry is the break (or rather the eruption) of language in meta-language.”

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