Jean Genet

, gay French novelist, poet, and criminal.

from ''The Theif's Journal:

• To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

In referance to the French Gestapo, from The Theif's Journal:

• With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.

from The Theif's Journal:

• Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.

from The Balcony

• So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.

Quoted in Edmund White's preface to Prisoner of Love:

• The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side.