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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn’t have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
I’ve always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer – all that preoccupation and brooding. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
