Jean Genet, from various interviews.

I would indeed like to free myself from all conventional morals, those that have hardened and crystallised and that impede growth, that impede life. But an artist is never completely destructive. The very concern with creating a harmonious sentence supposes a morality, that is a relation between the author and a possible reader. I write in order to be read. No one writes for nothing. In every aesthetics there is a morality.

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude? A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

[On The Maids] A critic said that maids ‘don’t speak that way’. They do speak that way, to me, when I’m alone at midnight.

I will hazard an explanation: writing is the last recourse when you have been betrayed. There’s something else I’d like to say to you: I realised very quickly, as young as fourteen or fifteen, that all I could be was a vagabond and a thief, not a good thief, but a thief all the same. I think my only success in the social world was or could have been along the lines of a ticket inspector on a bus, or a butcher’s assistant. And since this kind of success horrified me, I think that I trained myself at a very young age to have emotions that could only lead me in the direction of writing. If writing means experiencing such strong emotions or feelings that your entire life is marked out by them, if they are so strong that only their description, their evocation, or their analysis can really allow you to deal with them, then yes, it was at Mettray, and at fifteen years old, that I began to write.

Writing is perhaps what remains to you when you’ve been driven from the realm of the given world.