Gunter Grass Quotes

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

I always hope that my music can inspire someone, the same way other artists inspire me.

The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.

I think of the Tamil poet Subrahmanya Bharati every day, and he is an inspiration in my musical creations.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Ay, Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy.

That I make poetry and give pleasure - if I give pleasure - are because of you.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

I really love art and I always have in every single different form and I just hope that I'm able to give some art that will touch some people and help them to be more positive and stronger.

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means 'absolutely nothing' from the logical point of view.. ..should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint.

I don't go through a torturous intellectual process to decide what to direct. I know what I want to direct the second I read something or hear a story. I just know when it grabs me in a certain way I want to direct it. And then I spend the next four to six months trying to talk myself out of it, because directing is really hard! But it's true, I know essentially when and what I want to do next... it's an undeniable feeling I get and it's not the same feeling I get when I wind up producing something.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move through me, in a sense, what wants to be written is none of my business.

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.

I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it.

Anything that propels me to create, like [my book, Straight Walk]. It kept me inspired for almost four years.