W. G. Sebald

... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

— W. G. Sebald

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.

— W. G. Sebald

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

— W. G. Sebald

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always…

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

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

— 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

Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly…

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of…

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades…

— W. G. Sebald

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity…

— W. G. Sebald

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

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair,…

— W. G. Sebald

“Our concern with history is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while…

— W. G. Sebald

Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall…

— W. G. Sebald

Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17…

— W. G. Sebald

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

The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than…

— W. G. Sebald

“...and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the…

— W. G. Sebald

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all... only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of…

— 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…

— W. G. Sebald

How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

— W. G. Sebald

We all have appointments with the past.

— W. G. Sebald

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

— W. G. Sebald

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

“It just takes one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes”

— W. G. Sebald

A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.

— W. G. Sebald

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

— 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