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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
Drawing
Noise
Writing
Related Quotes:
" With drawing, I am acutely aware of creating something on a sheet of paper. It is a sensual act, which you cannot say about the act of writing. In fact, I often turn to drawing to recover from the writing. "
Gunter Grass
I Am
Writing
Turn
" Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper. "
Gunter Grass
Passion
Accusation
Art
" I've always been surrounded by children - never bothered by their noise. "
Gunter Grass
Been
Children
Always
" When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted. "
Gunter Grass
Writing
Book
Done
" 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
Understand
Hard
Same
" It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well. "
Gunter Grass
Good
Writing
Work
" 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. "
Gunter Grass
Year
Know
Group
" How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since 'The Tin Drum,' my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person's life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right. "
Gunter Grass
Life
Me
Story
" 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. "
Gunter Grass
Help
Hurt
Truth Is
" How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime? "
Gunter Grass
War
American
Side
" 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. "
Gunter Grass
You
Writing
Know
" 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
Utopia
Age
Work
" I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense. "
Gunter Grass
Apt
Words
Seductive
" We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.' "
Gunter Grass
Try
Great
History
" Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany. "
Gunter Grass
Right
Strong
Horror
" 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
Become
Class
Life
" 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. "
Gunter Grass
Story
Together
You
" Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form. "
Gunter Grass
Memory
Life
Time
" 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
Me
Argument
Country
" Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way. "
Gunter Grass
Dress
Will
Way
" 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. "
Gunter Grass
Myself
Volunteer
Boy
" Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss. "
Gunter Grass
Something
Only
Homeland
" 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
Time
Me
I Am
" If we take into account the existence of our planet, we have to recognise that we are guests that spend a short and very determined period in this world, and all we leave behind is nuclear waste. "
Gunter Grass
Behind
Leave
Existence
" 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. "
Gunter Grass
Children
Service
Uncle
" I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains. "
Gunter Grass
Up
Away
Church
" Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work. "
Gunter Grass
Prose
Stand
Work
" Our minds aren't bound by a chronological corset. When thinking and dreaming, past, present and future are mixed up. That's also possible for a writer. "
Gunter Grass
Thinking
Future
Minds
" Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises. "
Gunter Grass
Art
Full
Life
" We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place. "
Gunter Grass
Future
Statistics
Place