Gunter Grass

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.

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.

While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price.

Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?

I was a really bad teenager and I got my tongue pierced. I don't even remember where I did it, but it was under very surreptitious circumstances.