I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions …

Walser must at the time have hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning, and whose lengthening he anticipates at an early age …

… if Walser had any literary relative or predecessor, then it is Gogol. Both of them gradually lost the ability to keep their eye on the centre of the plot, losing themselves instead in the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of their vision, and about whose previous and future fate we never learn even the slightest thing.

In the 'microscripts' […]can be seen – as an ingenious method of continuing to write – coded messages of one forced into illegality and documents of a genuine 'inner emigration'.

… it is equally certain that unconsciously […] [Walser] was seeking to hide, behind the indecipherable characters, 'from both public and internalised instances of evaluation', to duck down from the level of language and to obliterate himself.

The exact definition of his illness is of little relevance. It is enough for us to understand that, in the end, Walser simply could not go on, and, like Hoelderlin, had to resort to keeping people at arm's length with a sort of anarchic politeness, becoming refractory and abusive, making scenes in public and believing that the bourgeois city of Berne, of all places, was a city of ghostly gesticulators, executing rapid hand movements directly in front of his face expressly in order to discombobulate him and to dismiss him out of hand as one who simply does not count.

It was enough for [Walser] to call himself – with bitterly resigned irony – at least the ninth-best writer in the Helvetic Federation.

Sebald, from his essay on Walser reprinted as the introduction to the translation of The Tanners