153 Quotes by Gunter Grass

And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I'll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice....

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?

What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he’s thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you’re past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.

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.

Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists.

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.

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray – and allowed itself to be led astray.

Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes, with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it.