Gunter Grass Quotes

• 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!

  Gunter Grass

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• I am moved, not only as an author, but as a person. And feel somehow guilty.

  Gunter Grass

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• I am a writer by profession. I seek in my writing to hold back time so that the past is not forgotten.

  Gunter Grass

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• Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

  Gunter Grass

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• 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.

  Gunter 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.

  Gunter Grass

• The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

  Gunter 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.

  Gunter Grass

• My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm’s fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of ‘Tom Thumb’ during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.

  Gunter 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.

  Gunter 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.

  Gunter 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.

  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

• I think it’s a shame that we have ‘Bild’ like you have the ‘Sun’. Now serious newspapers like ‘FAZ’ and ‘Spiegel’ use a bit of the tone of ‘Bild.’ This is terrible.

  Gunter 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.

  Gunter Grass

• I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it’s especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as ‘do-gooders.’ This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

  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 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.

  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

• 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

Gunter Grass (26)

Birth:	16th October, 1927
Nationality:	German
Profession:	Novelist, Playwriter, Poet

About

Günter Wilhelm Grass is a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely regarded as Germany's most famous living writer. Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig. In 1945, he came to West Germany as a homeless refugee, though in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood.

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