Gunter Grass Quotes

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 falsification, but a shifting.

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

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.

Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.

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

When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.

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.

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

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.

What novel - or what else in the world - can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine.

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

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

If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.

Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?

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.

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.

Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.