A Quote by W. G. Sebald

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

Quote Topics

Always English Fiction German Lecture Occasionally Odd Piece Small Teach Write Written

Quote Author

W. G. Sebald
German - Writer
May 18, 1944 - December 14, 2001

Some stories I write in Swedish, some in English. Short stories I've almost exclusively written in English lately, mostly because there's such a small market for them in Sweden and it doesn't really pay either. So, the translation goes both ways. What also factors in is that I have a different voice in English, which means that a straight translation wouldn't be the same as if I'd written it in English originally.

Karin Tidbeck

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English.

J. M. G. Le Clezio

A lot of the demos I write are all in English, so releasing music in English isn't translating to English, it's just keeping them in English.

Henry Lau

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

F. Sionil Jose

I have to laugh when the English claim they are such a wonderful nation. Everyone knows that Englishmen are really Germans, that the English kings were German, and that in Russia the emperors were either of German origin or received their education in Germany.

Hermann Goring

When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!

Jaap Stam

German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.

Bernard Berenson

I always lived in a multilingual society (Polish-Ukrainian, German-Ukrainian, English-Ukrainian), and was open to outside linguistic influences. I think it was within three years of coming to the US that I started writing in English, although purely for myself, not trying to get it published. Living in America, I was constantly in touch with English, and Ukrainian was for me a private language.

Yuriy Tarnawsky

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

Katie Kitamura

German can take a lot more pathos than English can. When you say "pathetic" in English it's a disparaging term, but when you say "pathetisch" in German it's just a description, not necessarily negative. That says a lot already.

Daniel Kehlmann

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

Lafcadio Hearn

English has always been my musical language. When I started writing songs when I was 13 or 14, I started writing in English because it's the language in between. I speak Finnish, I speak French, so I'll write songs in English because that's the music I listen to. I learned so much poetry and the poetic way of expressing myself is in English.

Olivia Merilahti

People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.

Kristin Scott Thomas

English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent.