Günter Grass Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Günter Grass
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.

Günter Grass
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.

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

Günter Grass
I want to warn against this time-honoured means of dealing with the past; I prefer, myself, to keep the wound open.

Günter Grass
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.

Günter Grass
The brief inscription meant for me reads: 'I kept silent'.

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

Günter Grass
I was silent. Because so many others have kept silent, the temptation is great … to shift the blame onto the collective guilt, or to talk about oneself only figuratively in the third person: He was, saw, did, said, he kept silent.

Günter Grass
We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!

Günter Grass
No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And the sun has spots. All geniuses menstruate. On sorrow floats laughter. In the heart of roaring lurks silence.

Günter Grass
The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling it speaks the truth.

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

Günter Grass
In those days, when every male who could stand half-way erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change of posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal.

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

Günter Grass
Only too soon it became clear to me that in this world of ours every Rasputin has his Goethe, that every Rasputin draws a Goethe or if you prefer every Goethe a Rasputin in his wake, or even makes one if need be, in order to be able to condemn him later on.

Günter Grass
For me it was primarily about getting out of there [his home]. Out of that corner, away from my family. It was like that for many of my generation. We were doing army service and then suddenly, one year later, the draft order was on the table. And then I realized, probably not until I was in Dresden, that it was the Waffen SS.

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

Günter Grass
Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

Günter Grass
When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror writing or otherwise disguised.

Günter Grass
It was the newsreels. I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white truth they served up.

Günter Grass
You can declare at the very start that it's impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your back, so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels.

Günter Grass
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 the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Günter Grass
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.

Günter Grass
My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book. It had to come out finally.

Günter Grass