W. G. Sebald

“England is not very easy to get in and out of.”

“Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to - a notion so universal, it's enscribed in all religions. If you didn't, they might exact revenge upon the living.”

“Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent.”

“The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get.”

“It would be presumptuous to say writing a book would be a sufficient gesture, but if people were more preoccupied with the past, maybe the events that overwhelm us would be fewer.”

“I am what I am.”

“I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again.”

“If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.”

“I don't want to talk about my trials and tribulations. Once you reveal even part of what your real problems might be in life, they come back in a deformed way.”

“I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.”

“Mine is a European imagination, shaped largely by my very promiscuous reading in German, French, English and, with greater difficulty, Italian.”

“Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.”

“Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.”

“Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.”

“The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.”

“I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.”

“I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.”

“My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.”

“When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.”

“Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.”