“Certainly I was delighted, when we had dinner once in New York (the only time I met him), that in person he was as quietly funny as his writing. He said that one of the elements of English life he most liked was English humor. ‘What is German humor like?’ I asked him. ‘It is dreadful,’ he said. ‘Have you seen any German comedy shows on television?’ he asked. I had not. ‘They are simply indescribable,’ he said, stretching the word in his lugubrious German accent. ‘Simply indescribable.’”
— From James Wood’s entry in the Threepenny Review’s W.G. Sebald Symposium, published the spring after his untimely death.
