Quotes About Memory

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.

A lot of its readers are of an age where they forget to cancel.

When I wrote 'The Interestings,' I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.

Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

Well, my favorite memory of a president was in 1984. I was in the grandstands at Daytona, and maybe I was 20 years old. So just sort of down in Daytona, having a good time for the 500 - or for the 400 in July. And Air Force One lands on the back straightaway. It was President Reagan.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

The last real job I had I was 16-years-old slinging fried chicken in my hometown of Naperville, Ill.

I knew off by heart the names of the Real Madrid team that played Liverpool in the European Cup final of 1981.

I feel like some of the delivery that people find funny is literally me trying to remember the exact line in real time.

I remember the moment it first hit me that my mother's memory was no longer the extraordinary phenomenon it had been all my life. The realisation came as a thunderbolt.

You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.

If you don't produce the goods, you're very quickly forgotten.

Google doesn't really forget.

Google my name and 'Barack Obama.' There were many days I was tough on him. People have short-term memories. They think we're only being tough on Trump. That's just not true.

The dead govern the living.

I started working around eigth grade. I remember doing a Doritos commercial where there were four days in a row of eating them, and I will tell you, I have not eaten many Doritos since.

I use a note-taking system I learned in history class in eleventh grade.

I mean, I did a play when I was in eighth grade, but who hasn't?

I graduated from University of Maryland, 1996 - or '97, actually.

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.