153 Quotes by 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.

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.

Students who don’t want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.

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?

We struck up a conversation, but took pains to keep to small talk at first. We touched on the most trivial of topics: I asked if he thought the fate of man was unalterable. He thought it was.

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...

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.

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