W. G. Sebald

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

In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I am what I am.

Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent.

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

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.

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 am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.

There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.

My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.

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

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

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

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

You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.

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

To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.

Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to - a notion so universal, it's enscribed in all religions. If you didn't, they might exact revenge upon the living.

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

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