Gunter Grass Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“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.”
-- Gunter 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.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.”
-- Gunter 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.”
-- Gunter 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.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“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 to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“What does a river like the Vistula carry away with it? Everything that goes to pieces: wood, glass, pencils, pacts ... chairs, bones, and sunsets too. What had long been forgotten rose to memory, floating on its back or stomach, with the help of the Vistula.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“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 in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“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.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“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.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.”
-- Gunter Grass -
“[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.”
-- Gunter 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.”
-- Gunter Grass
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