Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gunter Grass Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gunter Grass.

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Famous Quotes By Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1669197

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1751063

I am not faithful but I am attached. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 2175695

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 927826

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1798138

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 218630

I've always been surrounded by children - never bothered by their noise. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1105028

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1768801

What did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they could cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it? — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1896743

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1945802

On sorrow floats laughter. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 992938

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1612588

When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1321647

Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours
I am not referring to the borders of the graves
and if you will, a meaning. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1062121

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1637458

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 854868

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1661583

Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1899420

My pride in Joachim Mahlke was as sweet as chocolate creams. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1153097

People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1037786

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1633659

Love That's it: The cashless commerce. The blanket always too short. The loose connexion. To search behind the horizon. To brush fallen leaves with four shoes and in one's mind to rub bare feet. To let and rent hearts; or in a room with shower and mirror, in a hired car, bonnet facing the moon, wherever innocence stops and burns its programme, the word in falsetto sounds different and new each time. Today, in front of a box office not yet open, hand in hand crackled the hangdog old man and the dainty old woman. The film promised love. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 535162

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1900011

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. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 945573

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2214286

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1380349

You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1932669

Mahlke couldn't joke. He sometimes tried. But everything he did, touched or said, became solemn, significant, monumental; — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 540959

There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1949040

Art is hard for a puritan to understand. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1843405

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2092164

We struck up a conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would absolutely have to die, but he was less sure that all men had to be born ... — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1034162

How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since 'The Tin Drum,' my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person's life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1263501

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1498748

I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1504834

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1509910

There is also such a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1558568

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1569804

No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And the sun has spots. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1570572

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1580713

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2111143

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2254756

And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 2211167

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 2199904

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2199077

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2180327

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2166880

What novel - or what else in the world - can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine ... — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 2152347

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2150759

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1716485

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 2026063

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1928358

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1923913

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1917776

We dance for the pure joy of it. In the kitchen to the record player. Because we've got it in us. All over ... it's not just in the legs. It comes from inside and runs all through you. In waves. From down below to up above. All the way to the scalp. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1913401

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1851312

I expected more from literature than from real, naked life. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1736093

Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 647920

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 852024

I wept when the muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded by tears I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Sapse Cemetery. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 835714

Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 789862

There is no such thing as a parttime partisan. Real partisans are partisans always and as long as they live. They put fallen governments back in power and overthrow governments that have just been put in power with the help of partisans. Mr Matzerath contended - and his thesis struck me as perfectly plausible - that among all those who go in for politics your incorrigible partisan, who undermines what he has just set up, is closest to the artist because he consistently rejects what he has just set up. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 734658

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 725525

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 700234

Because men
are killing the forests
the fairy tales are running away.
The spindle doesn't know
whom to prick,
the little girl's hands
that her father has chopped off,
haven't a single tree to catch hold of,
the third wish remains unspoken.
King Thrushbeard no longer owns one thing.
Children can no longer get lost.
The number seven means no more than exactly seven.
Because men have killed the forests,
the fairy tales are trotting off to the cities
and end badly. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 689072

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 688956

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 670222

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 666210

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 902427

We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 638596

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 634533

I have seen and drawn dying, poisoned worlds. I published a book of drawings called 'Death of Wood' about one such world, on the border between the Federal Republic of Germany and what was then still the German Democratic Republic. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 568686

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 545120

I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 415111

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 361403

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 360883

They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 357811

You American intellectuals - you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted! — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 326548

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 212399

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1148715

An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1459848

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1405006

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1352991

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1279671

What more can I say: born beneath light bulbs, interrupted my growth at the age of three, was given a drum, sangshattered glass, smelled vanilla, coughed in churches, stuffed Luzie with food, watched ants as they crawled, decided to grow, buried the drum, moved to the West, lost what was East, learned to carve stone and posed as a model, went back to my drum and inspected concrete, made money and cared for the finger, gave the finger away and fled as I laughed, ascended, arrested, convicted, confined, now soon to be freed, and today is my birthday, I'm thirty years old, and still as afraid of the Black Cook as ever - Amen. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 117275

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1244683

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1244299

Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1211717

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1158090

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1148741

I remember when I was writing 'The Tin Drum,' I had the totally misguided idea of giving Oskar Matzerath a sister, and he just wouldn't have it. There was no space for a sister, yet I had the character of the sister in my head. In fact I used her in later novels, in 'Cat and Mouse' and 'Dog Years,' Tulla Pokriski. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1472989

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1115131

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1075396

Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed? — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1064130

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1060836

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1034574

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 1030938

I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years. — Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass Quotes 1013288

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 962971

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

Gunter Grass Quotes 931043

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