Quotes by Gunther Grass

• Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
• Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.