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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.

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
Soon
Melancholy
Consciousness
Leisure
Subordinated
Principles
Dawn
Busyness
Age
Absolutes
Coincide
Come
Absolute
Perpetually
Without
Principle
Modernism
Work
Busy
Utopian
Conflict
Utopia

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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.
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Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
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On sorrow floats laughter.
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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.
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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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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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Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
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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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There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.
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Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
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Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.
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What does a river like the Vistula carry away with it? Everything that goes to pieces: wood, glass, pencils, pacts ... chairs, bones, and sunsets too. What had long been forgotten rose to memory, floating on its back or stomach, with the help of the Vistula.
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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.
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Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
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Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
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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.
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Art is hard for a puritan to understand.
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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.
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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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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