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

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.

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

W. G. Sebald Quotes