W. G. Sebald

“To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.”

“Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.”

“I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position.”

“There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.”

“My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.”

“It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding.”

“I cannot get over the fact that I was born in 1944. I want to find out as much as I can about that year.”

“Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.”

“I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.”

“In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.”

“People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.”

“Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.”

“The writing I do makes great demands on translators.”

“You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.”

“My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army.”

“In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.”

“A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.”

“It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.”