"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."
— Jean Genet

"She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . . "
— Jean Genet (Querelle)

"First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up. ..."
— Jean Genet

"The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they draw their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them."
— Jean Genet (Querelle)

"When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you."
— Jean Genet

"...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone."
— Jean Genet (Funeral Rites)

"He already had one foot in the winter of heaven. He was going to be whisked up."
— Jean Genet (Miracle De La Rose)

"Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel."
— Jean Genet (The Thief's Journal)

"Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!"
— Jean Genet (Querelle)

"Thereafter, he ennobled shame. He bore it in my presence like a burden, like a tiger clinging to his shoulders, the threat of which imparted to his shoulders a most insolent submissiveness."
— Jean Genet (The Thief's Journal)

"...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments."
— Jean Genet (Miracle of the Rose)

"I say empty, but if they close their eyes, they become more disturbing to me than are huge prisons to the nubile maiden who passes by the high barred windows, prisons behind which sleeps, dreams, swears, and spits a race of murderers, which makes of each cell the hissing nest of a tangle of snakes, but also a kind of confessional with a curtain of dusty serge."
— Jean Genet (Our Lady Of The Flowers)