Quotes About Memory

Everyone has a story to tell. All you have to do is write it. But it's not that easy.

A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.

To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.

Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!

Every person has a legacy. You may not know what your impact is, and it may not be something that you can write on your tombstone, but every person has an impact on this world.

We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.

If I don't write down a thought - or an image or a line of poetry - the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen.

It's still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

The last thing in the world I want to do is write something in memory of Walter Mischel. I still can't quite accept that he's gone. And so I procrastinate, and with every day I don't put pen to paper, I reinforce his life's work with my reluctance.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Nostalgia is a sweet place for a poet and writer to be in. But it's an indulgence; a distraction. You can't live in a distraction.

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

My favorite writer is Alice Munro. It's simply amazing how well she captures entire lifetimes in a single short story.

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.

The first time I went to Helene Hanff's apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer.

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

With contemporary writers, I often buy books and then realise I've bought them before.

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.