on Genet's creation of self

What can I decide to be if I am already what I am: if I am ‘locked up in my being’? The word ‘being’ for Genet assumes an active, positive value, and in the phrase ‘J’ai decide d’etre ce que le crime a fait de moi’, to be is to throw oneself into one’s being in order to coincide with it.

- R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper - Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy: 1950 - 1960, pg. 75.