Top 100 Gunter Grass Quotes
#1. I hope Gunter Grass will continue helping the SPD in campaigns and that he will otherwise remain with us as a provocative literary figure, as well.
Sigmar Gabriel
#2. We struck up a conversation, but took pains to keep to small talk at first. We touched on the most trivial of topics: I asked if he thought the fate of man was unalterable. He thought it was.
Gunter Grass
#3. It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.
Gunter Grass
#4. After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.
Gunter Grass
#5. With drawing, I am acutely aware of creating something on a sheet of paper. It is a sensual act, which you cannot say about the act of writing. In fact, I often turn to drawing to recover from the writing.
Gunter Grass
#6. I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
Gunter Grass
#7. Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.
Gunter Grass
#8. 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?
Gunter Grass
#9. 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
Gunter Grass
#10. For me, writing, drawing, and political activism are three separate pursuits; each has its own intensity. I happen to be especially attuned to and engaged with the society in which I live. Both my writing and my drawing are invariably mixed up with politics, whether I want them to be or not.
Gunter Grass
#11. 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.
Gunter Grass
#12. I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains.
Gunter Grass
#13. When Jan was called up to service a fourth time...my mother waited outside...the two of them were convinced that this time Jan would have to go, that they would surely send him off to cure his ailing chest in the air of France, famed for its iron and lead content.
Gunter Grass
#14. 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.
Gunter Grass
#15. There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.
Gunter Grass
#16. I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.
Gunter Grass
#17. I think it's a shame that we have 'Bild' like you have the 'Sun'. Now serious newspapers like 'FAZ' and 'Spiegel' use a bit of the tone of 'Bild.' This is terrible.
Gunter Grass
#19. Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.
Gunter Grass
#21. To feel myself. Light as a feather free as a bird, though long since fit to be shot down. Unleash the dog with no sense of shame. Become this or that. Awaken the dead. Wear my pal Baldander's rags for a change. Lose my way on a single-minded quest.
Gunter Grass
#22. Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
Gunter Grass
#23. Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that.
Gunter Grass
#24. I search on my drum for the land of the Poles and drum: lost, not yet lost, lost once more, lost to whom, lost too soon, lost by now, Poland's lost, all is lost, Poland is not yet lost.
Gunter Grass
#25. Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery.
SHOW YOUR TONGUE
Gunter Grass
#26. But every time I shunned books, as scholars sometimes do, cursed them as verbal graveyards, and tried to make contact with the common folk, I ran up against the kids in our building and felt fortunate, after a few brushes with those little cannibals, to return to my reading in one piece.
Gunter Grass
#27. Stuffed cats are able to creep more convincingly than live ones.
Gunter Grass
#28. Suppose you're teaching math. You assume that parallel lines meet at infinity. You'll admit that adds up to something like transcendence.
Gunter Grass
#29. Three times Jan had been called to the colours (the army), but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition..when every male who could stand halfway erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change in posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal
Gunter Grass
#30. A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can't be done if he keeps his distance. A literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won't really be pure.
Gunter Grass
#31. What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
Gunter Grass
#32. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#33. My sister and I did not have our own rooms, or even a place to ourselves. In the living room, beyond the two windows, was a little corner where my books were kept, and other thing - my watercolors and so on. Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise.
Gunter Grass
#34. They swore by concrete. They built for eternity.
Gunter Grass
#35. [America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
Gunter Grass
#36. I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.
Gunter Grass
#37. We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'
Gunter Grass
#38. In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.
Gunter Grass
#39. You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
Gunter Grass
#40. Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
Gunter Grass
#41. Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss.
Gunter Grass
#42. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists.
Gunter Grass
#43. Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
Gunter Grass
#44. Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
Gunter Grass
#45. If hell's in store for us someday, one of its most refined forms of torture will be to lock a person naked in a room filled with framed photos of his era.
Gunter Grass
#46. Once upon a time there was a musician who slew his four cats, stuffed them in a garbage can, left the building, and went to visit friends.
Gunter Grass
#47. My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.
Gunter Grass
#48. An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman.
Gunter Grass
#49. Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Gunter Grass
#50. Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
Gunter Grass
#51. How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime?
Gunter Grass
#52. Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Gunter Grass
#53. What does a river like the Vistula carry away with it? Everything that goes to pieces: wood, glass, pencils, pacts ... chairs, bones, and sunsets too. What had long been forgotten rose to memory, floating on its back or stomach, with the help of the Vistula.
Gunter Grass
#54. The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
Gunter Grass
#55. For marriage has nothing in common with love. marriage makes for security; love makes only for suffering. On the other hand, love could be so distilled, spun so fine as to implicate third and fourth persons, as to take up three or four exciting acts in a play.
Gunter Grass
#56. My pride in Joachim Mahlke was as sweet as chocolate creams.
Gunter Grass
#57. Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.
Gunter Grass
#58. Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
Gunter Grass
#59. People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?
Gunter Grass
#60. If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
Gunter Grass
#61. And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.
Gunter Grass
#62. What I do is sometimes - at least in Germany - met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I've decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn't feel any more.
Gunter Grass
#63. As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.
Gunter Grass
#65. And Oskar was kneeling at the left side-altar, trying to teach the boy Jesus how to drum, but the rascal wouldn't drum, offered no miracle. Oskar had sworn back then and swore again outside the locked church door: I'll teach him to drum yet. Sooner or later.
Gunter Grass
#66. [To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Gunter Grass
#67. No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And the sun has spots.
Gunter Grass
#68. Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
Gunter Grass
#70. The European Union arose on an economic foundation, and it turns out that even this is not a solid base. Cultural identity has been neglected.
Gunter Grass
#71. I've always been surrounded by children - never bothered by their noise.
Gunter Grass
#72. 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.
Gunter Grass
#73. A fifteen-year-old dropped her cone, bent to retrieve it, then hesitated, abandoned the melting delicacy to the pavement and the soles of future passers-by; soon she would be one of the grown-ups and no longer lick ice cream in the street.
Gunter Grass
#74. Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
Gunter Grass
#75. The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.
Gunter Grass
#77. How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.
Gunter Grass
#78. 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.
Gunter Grass
#79. If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.
Gunter Grass
#80. I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.
Gunter Grass
#81. Gregor was a real drinker..he didn't drink because he was sad..(or) cheerful. He drank because he was a thorough man, who like to get to the bottom of things, of bottles as well as everything else.
Gunter Grass
#82. Mahlke couldn't joke. He sometimes tried. But everything he did, touched or said, became solemn, significant, monumental;
Gunter Grass
#83. Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes, with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it.
Gunter Grass
#84. What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.
Gunter Grass
#85. One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.
Gunter Grass
#86. Klepp, however...must have given the cigarette girl a photo unbeknownst to me, because he became engaged to the snippety little thing and married her one day, because he wanted to have his picture back
Gunter Grass
#87. 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.
Gunter Grass
#88. The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.
Gunter Grass
#89. Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.
Gunter Grass
#90. So rode the squadrons out against the grey steel foe, adding another dash of red to the sunset glow.
Gunter Grass
#91. 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.
Gunter Grass
#92. You American intellectuals - you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!
Gunter Grass
#93. Our minds aren't bound by a chronological corset. When thinking and dreaming, past, present and future are mixed up. That's also possible for a writer.
Gunter Grass
#94. I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.
Gunter Grass
#95. He was taking advantage of the brief lull in the battle to take a little nap, for do not all men, even heroes, need a refreshing little nap now and then?
Gunter Grass
#96. Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.
Gunter Grass
#97. 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 ...
Gunter Grass
#98. Better start running, the Black Cook's coming! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Gunter Grass
#99. 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 ...
Gunter Grass
#100. 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.
Gunter Grass
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