He wanted to assume his entire condition, to carry the world on his shoulders and to become, in defiance of all, what all have made of him.

...the impossible must be supposed in order to explain the superdetermination of the event

The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us.

For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him...reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling.

The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it.

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.

Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster

The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness.