Quotes by Gunter Grass

“Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.”

“We are creating the future.”

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

“I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”

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

“Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.”

“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.”

“The naked figure will not get ahead between the mirrors.”

“I dont want you to sketch this cripple, this freak of nature, I want you to slaughter him, crucify him, to nail him to your paper with charcoal!”

“The trend is towards the bourgeois-smug.”

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

Im 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.

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.

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

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, dont you feel a certain alienation?

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

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

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.