Top 60 Günter Grass Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.”

— Günter Grass

2. “We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.”

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

4. “On sorrow floats laughter.”

— Günter Grass

5. “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.”

— Günter Grass

6. “Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.”

— Günter Grass

7. “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.”

— Günter Grass

8. “Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”

— Günter Grass

9. “It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.”

— Günter Grass

10. “Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.”

— Günter Grass

11. “What makes books – and with them writers – so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?”

— Günter Grass

12. “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.”

— Günter Grass

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13. “I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.”

— Günter Grass

14. “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.”

— Günter Grass

15. “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.”

— Günter Grass

16. “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?”

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

18. “And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I’ll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice...”

— Günter Grass

19. “Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.”

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

21. “The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.”

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

23. “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.”

— Günter Grass

24. “In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.”

— Günter Grass

25. “I am not faithful but I am attached.”

— Günter Grass

26. “Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.”

— Günter Grass

27. “They swore by concrete. They built for eternity.”

— Günter Grass

28. “Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.”

— Günter Grass

29. “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.”

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

31. “You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.”

— Günter Grass

32. “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.”

— Günter Grass

33. “Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.”

— Günter Grass

34. “What I do is sometimes – at least in Germany – met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I’ve decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn’t feel any more.”

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

37. “Art is hard for a puritan to understand.”

— Günter Grass

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

— Günter Grass

39. “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.”

— Günter Grass

40. “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.”

— Günter Grass

41. “The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”

— Günter Grass

42. “There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we’d all been weaned too soon.”

— Günter Grass

43. “In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.”

— Günter Grass

44. “Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn’t want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives.”

— Günter Grass

45. “How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.”

— Günter Grass

46. “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.”

— Günter Grass

47. “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.”

— Günter Grass

48. “Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?”

— Günter Grass

49. “When Satan’s not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn’t even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?”

— Günter Grass

50. “Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.”

— Günter Grass