You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
It would be presumptuous to say writing a book would be a sufficient gesture, but if people were more preoccupied with the… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again. — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
“In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share
“It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
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… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
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… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit. — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
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,… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
Mine is a European imagination, shaped largely by my very promiscuous reading in German, French, English and, with greater difficulty, Italian. — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
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… — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them. — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. — W. G. Sebald Copy Share Image
