Günter Grass Quotes

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

~ Günter Grass

When Jan was called up to service a fourth time...my mother waited outside...the two of them were convinced that this time Jan would have to go, that they would surely send him off to cure his ailing chest in the air of France, famed for its iron and lead content.

~ Günter Grass

Three times Jan had been called to the colours (the army), but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition..when every male who could stand halfway erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change in posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal

~ Günter Grass

Gregor was a real drinker..he didn't drink because he was sad..(or) cheerful. He drank because he was a thorough man, who like to get to the bottom of things, of bottles as well as everything else.

~ Günter Grass

For marriage has nothing in common with love. marriage makes for security; love makes only for suffering. On the other hand, love could be so distilled, spun so fine as to implicate third and fourth persons, as to take up three or four exciting acts in a play.

~ 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

They swore by concrete. They built for eternity.

~ Günter Grass

When the young womanleans over the sky,about to water the flowers as well as the weeds,her white front splits openuntil her milk runs.

~ Günter Grass

...my pride in Joachim Mahlke was as sweet as chocolate creams.

~ Günter 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.

~ Günter Grass

Stuffed cats are able to creep more convincingly than live ones.

~ Günter Grass

Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.

~ Günter Grass

You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.

~ 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

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.

~ Günter Grass

I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains.

~ 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?

~ Günter Grass

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

~ Günter Grass

Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.

~ 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