Gunter Grass

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

“An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.”

“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...”

“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.”

“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 water...”

“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 recent...”

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

“How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime?”

“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. B...”

“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...”

“We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an...”

“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, perpe...”

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

“Our minds aren't bound by a chronological corset. When thinking and dreaming, past, present and future are mixed up. That's also possible for a writer.”

“I have seen and drawn dying, poisoned worlds. I published a book of drawings called 'Death of Wood' about one such world, on the border between the Federal Republic of Germany and what was t...”

“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.”

“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...”

“I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.”

“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 f...”

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