Gunter Grass Quotes

61 quotes in 1096 categories

• 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…
• Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
• I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes…
• Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
• Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
• After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The…
• 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 have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
• 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…
• 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…
• It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
• Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
• It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.
• How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.
• Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God…
• Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.
• 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…
• If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to…
• The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.

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