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

Gunter Grass

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Gunter Grass
Age: 87 †
Born: 1927
Born: October 16
Died: 2015
Died: April 13
Altar Server
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Lyricist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Printmaker
Danzig
Günter Wilhelm Grass
Günter Graß
Günter Wilhelm Graß
Wonderfully
Pointless
Irrational
Necessary
Understand
Artist
Art
Exuberantly
Hard
Puritan

More quotes by Gunter Grass

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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?
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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.
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...I remain restless and dissatisfied what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters
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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, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.
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Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
Gunter Grass
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What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.
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Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
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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.
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[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Gunter Grass
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If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
Gunter Grass
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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?
Gunter Grass
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Art is hard for a puritan to understand.
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment we stagnate despite the rising GNP.
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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.
Gunter Grass
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You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
Gunter Grass
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What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
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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.
Gunter Grass