Günter Grass quotes

Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred. (Günter Grass)
Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped. View quote
Günter Grass
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open. View quote
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. View quote
Günter Grass
I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense. View quote
Günter Grass
I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray. View quote
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. View quote
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! View quote
Günter Grass
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. View quote
Günter Grass
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place. View quote
Günter Grass
As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things. (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. View quote
Günter Grass
Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early. View quote
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. View quote
Günter Grass
Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that. View quote
Günter Grass
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. View quote
Günter Grass
I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours. View quote
Günter Grass
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. View quote
Günter Grass
People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation? View quote
Günter Grass
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. View quote
Günter Grass
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them. (Günter Grass)
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. View quote
Günter Grass
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. View quote
Günter Grass
In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself. View quote
Günter Grass
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. View quote
Günter Grass