Günter Grass Short Quotes

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Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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