About Gunter Grass: Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Einerseits geben Wörter Sinn, andererseits sind sie tauglich, Unsinn zu stiften. Wörter können heilsam oder verletzend sein. Das Wort als Waffe. Sich spreizende, auftrumpfende, mit Bedeutung gemästete Wörter. Manche sind Zungenbrecher, andere la...
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.
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.
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
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.
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...
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.
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.
As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.
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.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
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.
Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
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.
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
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, the...
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.
