Former posting: When I read this [observation by Sebald] I was immediately carried over to what V.Nabokov wrote about his novel “Lolita” when, in a retrospective view, he feels it as a painting hanging on a wall (I wish I had my books by me to quote these words correctly).  Perhaps the entire process of writing fiction was for him a way to engender a mental picture that could be felt “outside time” and… as a kind of redemption!

Present Posting: Ihave found the quote, but it is a bit different from what I remembered, perhaps it had been altered by the author’s words which were previously registered in Strong Opinions.  I’ll try to bring up the entire sequence in a chronological order. The actual quote is as follows: “ I think that I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist’s Studio by Van Bock.” (SO,72-73).

Other quotes, sequentially: “Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed” (SO,6) 1962.

“I don’t write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end. I just fill in the gaps in the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind, picking out a piece here and a piece there and filling out part of the sky and part of the landscape and part of the – I don’t know, the carousing hunters.” (SO, 16-17),1962.

“Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the fure nest and the eggs in it …I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer…but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration completed the task for me.” (SO,31),1964.

“Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow – perhaps because it is the purest of all,the most abstract and carefully contrived.” (SO,46-7),1964.

So, there!
Btw: I noticed that the lines from “Lolita” ch.25 ( ‘Wanted’): “the rest is rust and stardust” may be seen to resort to a kind of “wordgolf,” as later explored in length in “Pale Fire” (rest-rust-dust). I wonder if there are other such instances in VN’s poems or in “Lolita.”