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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Gunter Grass Quotes

No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn’t pure. And the sun has spots.

– 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 remember when I was writing ‘The Tin Drum,’ I had the totally misguided idea of giving Oskar Matzerath a sister, and he just wouldn’t have it. There was no space for a sister, yet I had the character of the sister in my head. In fact I used her in later novels, in ‘Cat and Mouse’ and ‘Dog Years,’ Tulla Pokriski.

– Gunter Grass

My sister and I did not have our own rooms, or even a place to ourselves. In the living room, beyond the two windows, was a little corner where my books were kept, and other thing – my watercolors and so on. Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise.

– 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’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

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany.

– Gunter Grass

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

– Gunter Grass

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

– Gunter Grass

Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.

– Gunter Grass

For me, writing, drawing, and political activism are three separate pursuits; each has its own intensity. I happen to be especially attuned to and engaged with the society in which I live. Both my writing and my drawing are invariably mixed up with politics, whether I want them to be or not.

– 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

A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can’t be done if he keeps his distance. A literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won’t really be pure.

– Gunter 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.

– 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

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

– Gunter Grass

Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.

– Gunter Grass

I can only write a book like ‘The Tin Drum’ or ‘From the Diary of a Snail’ at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

– Gunter Grass

Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.

– Gunter Grass

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

– Gunter Grass

How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since ‘The Tin Drum,’ my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person’s life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right.

– Gunter Grass

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