Art & Creativity Quote by Gunter Grass

There is a delicious provocation in calling even bad books “sacred”: Grass isn’t blessing mediocrity so much as defending the ecosystem that produces dissent, memory, and trouble. The line works because it yokes two words that don’t comfortably share a sentence. “Bad” is the market’s verdict, the critic’s gavel, the reader’s eye-roll. “Sacred” drags in churches, taboos, burnings. Grass uses that friction to argue that literature’s value can’t be reduced to taste or prestige; the object itself carries a civic charge.

The subtext is Germany’s 20th-century trauma, where the fate of books was never merely aesthetic. Grass came of age in the shadow of Nazi book burnings and later made a career out of prying open national amnesia. In that context, “sacred” reads less like piety and more like a warning label: societies that start sorting books into “worthy” and “unworthy” quickly graduate to sorting people. His own controversies - from his long, uneasy relationship to postwar guilt to the uproar over his late disclosure of Waffen-SS service - make the claim sharper. He knew how fragile moral authority is, and how quickly culture becomes a court.

“Even bad books” also quietly democratizes literature. It defends the awkward debut novel, the unpopular argument, the unfashionable voice. Grass is staking out a principle: the freedom to write badly is part of the freedom to write at all, and the book, as a vessel of thought, deserves protection precisely when it fails to impress.