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All Quotes by author - W. G. Sebald

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I am what I am. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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, they come back in a deformed way. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller. "

" 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 small town, so I hardly ever saw him. "

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

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

" 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 the army as a captain. "

" 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. "

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

" People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. "

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

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

" The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. "

" 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. "

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