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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— W. G. Sebald

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror,…

— 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

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

— W. G. Sebald

I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow…

— W. G. Sebald

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

— W. G. Sebald

I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located…

— W. G. Sebald

A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives…

— W. G. Sebald

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…

— 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

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

— W. G. Sebald