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.

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

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.

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.

On sorrow floats laughter.

Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.

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.

How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.

Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.

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

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

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.

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

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.

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

I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.

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

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

Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.

Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.

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

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

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

Art is hard for a puritan to understand.