Gunter Grass Quotes

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.

Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.

And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I'll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice.

How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.

An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.

Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?

On sorrow floats laughter.

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.

It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.

I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.

The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.

Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

...I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters

In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.

Art is hard for a puritan to understand.

One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.

Can it be that action is active resignation? Something is trying to develop; it moves ever so slightly, and there comes your man of action and bashes in the hothouse windows.

I am not faithful but I am attached.

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.

When Satan's not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn't even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?

Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.

If I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word 'doorknob', because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us.

[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.

Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn't want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives.

[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.

Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.

If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.

Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.

Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.

I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains.

I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.