Gunter Grass
12 quotes
Biography
"Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper."
"As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things."
"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 often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place."
"The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open."
"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, don't you feel a certain alienation?"
"Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work."