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16 quotes by W. G. Sebald

Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001) — known as W.G. Sebald or Max Sebald — was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a 2007 interview, Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned Sebald, Ryszard...
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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... →

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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... →

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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... →

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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... →

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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... →

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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... →

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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... →

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