Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.

Günter Grass

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

Günter Grass

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Günter Grass

Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.

Günter Grass

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

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.

Günter Grass

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

Read more quotes from these Nobel Laureates in Literature:

Doris LessingAlice MunroKazuo IshiguroJean Paul Sartre
Mario Vargas LlosaBob DylanPearl S. Buck Albert Camus
J. M. CoetzeeOrhan PamukV.S. Naipaul Seamus Heaney
Ernest HemingwayNadine GordimerGünter GrassKenzaburo Oe
Harold PinterDario FoJose SaramagoWislawa Szymborska
Wole SoyinkaOctavio PazAndre GideGabriel Garcia Marquez
Patrick WhitePablo NerudaSamuel BeckettShmuel Y. Agnon
Bertrand RussellNaguib MahfouzJoseph BrodskyJohn Steinbeck
Salvatore Quasimodo Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThomas MannHermann Hesse

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

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

Günter Grass