W. G. Sebald

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

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.

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.

I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.

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

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

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

This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

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.

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.

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.