Although the cliché of the melancholic loner often determined his public perception, W.G. Sebald was an author who frequently engaged in conversation. From 1990 onwards, the start of his literary career, he willingly gave over 80 interviews for television, radio, magazines and newspapers in both German and English. In these interviews, Sebald talked about his own writing more openly and in greater detail than anywhere else, yet at the same time he toyed with the fusion of fact and fiction in his decidedly autofictional literature. The interviews also provide Sebald with an opportunity to install a certain authorial image of himself, though at the same time he often attempted to defend himself against misperceptions, such as the classification as a Holocaust author. Last but not least, the interviews show Sebald as an author who - which is by no means the rule in interviews with writers - repeatedly questions and ironizes himself.