Translator Quotes by W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

“In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my…

— W. G. Sebald

“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

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

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

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

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

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

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

— W. G. Sebald

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

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

— W. G. Sebald

Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

“This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.”

— W. G. Sebald

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.

— W. G. Sebald