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" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Boy
Wind
Now
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" The writing I do makes great demands on translators. "
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" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Parents
Captain
Army
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Language
Yourself
Trust
" My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army. "
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Me
Army
Away
" I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again. "
W. G. Sebald
Up
Been
Always
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Idea
Bad
Writer
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Dark
Time
School
" 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. "
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People
Years
Small
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Trials
You
Talk
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Culture
War
Innocent
" Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them. "
W. G. Sebald
Kind
Seem
Places
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Small
Father
Small Town
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Like
Meaning
Over
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Village
You
Thought
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Memory
Chance
Lead
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Bad Day
Past
You
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Culture
Beauty
Truth
" Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. "
W. G. Sebald
Only
Opening
Film
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Odd
Piece
Small
" Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there. "
W. G. Sebald
Hold
I Feel
Feel
" Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether. "
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Me
Out
Circumstances
" I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position. "
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Position
Moral
Think
" England is not very easy to get in and out of. "
W. G. Sebald
Easy
England
Get
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Experience
Loss
Time
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
View
Think
Makeup
" I am what I am. "
W. G. Sebald
I Am
I Am What I Am
Am
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Know
Better
Eyes
" I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit. "
W. G. Sebald
Anonymity
Write
Will
" I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business. "
W. G. Sebald
Way
Business
Through
" It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding. "
W. G. Sebald
Live
Writer
Uncomfortable