Gunter Grass
Gunter Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grasswas a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 October 1927
CountryGermany
memories trying together
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.
progress tails coins
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.
book media church
What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
risk complaining development
So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.
morning believe reading
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.
years volunteer criminals
I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.
generations socialism grew
I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.
seductive nonsense found
I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
suicidal games rivals
After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.
artist desire conquer
[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
father sunday epic
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...
night singing empty
An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
auschwitz explanation ifs
Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
uncles children law
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.