Gunter Grass Quotes

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

I've lived a fast-paced life, but I had the best childhood. I didn't miss out on anything by having my daughter at a young age.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

There are moments when I can't believe I'm as old as I am. But I feel better physically than I did 10 years ago. I don't think, Oh God, I'm missing something.

I don't think much of anything I wrote before the age of 30.

Something I've noticed as I get older is that I do think about the future more. It's all positive thinking.

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

Everything that I write is sort of autobiographical, and I don't know that I'm getting better, but I'm certainly running out of time.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

We've always written from personal experiences.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

Only when your memories are more important to you than your goals are you old.

The fact is that this conversation is going on at every level at every age, we're all going, "God, what a jerk I've been," "How could I have married that guy?" or "How could I have done this or that?" With time, this is the gift of being older, that you get to look back and say, "It wasn't all about them."

At thirty, man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan.

[At age 92:] There are places I'd like to return to. But not as I was then but as I am now. 'Cause I'm trying to understand. And I've understood nothing.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

We all grow older and we all have to live with ourselves.

I don't know if I have any regrets, I have had a pretty successful life. I have learned good, bad, and ugly.