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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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Gunter Grass
Age: 87 †
Born: 1927
Born: October 16
Died: 2015
Died: April 13
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Günter Wilhelm Grass
Günter Graß
Günter Wilhelm Graß
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More quotes by Gunter Grass

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If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
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One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.
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How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.
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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 so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
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Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
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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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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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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?
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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.
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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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An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
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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.
Gunter Grass
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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
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I catch myself judging myself as that 13-year-old boy, who, of course, rightfully points out that he is only a child. And my membership - well, I was drafted into the Waffen-SS and didn't exactly volunteer, which was just as idiotic. I wanted to be on the submarines and then ended up with the Waffen-SS.
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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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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.
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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.
Gunter Grass
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You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
Gunter Grass
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Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
Gunter Grass