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- One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- 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
- 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
- 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