Quotes About Memory

I retain characters more often than plot, but what seems to happen is that I latch on to specific moments, turns of phrase, and dialogue as touchstones for me to recall what happened in the book. Kind of like freeze-frame.

Gypsy was the name my brother gave a pet turtle he had. I always thought it was so peculiar.

As a person, when I was seven or eight, my dad would try very hard to tutor me through school because I had learning difficulties or whatever. I would wish that they could just plant a chip in my brain so that I would know everything and not have to study.

Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.

'Monty Python' was never on TV in the U.K. when I was a kid.

I don't have a good memory, so learning all the songs for my TV performances was a real challenge.

I was brought up with TV comedians. I'll remember them till I go to my grave, all those comedians, as decadent fluff.

My earliest memory is nursing and struggling to see the colored lights making up the map of the world, the famous backdrop for Larry King's TV show. There's an 'I-want-to-do-all-things-at-once' kind of theme to it.

I play games on-set at work. Sometimes I can't remember people's names, so I start throwing out clues. Like if I can't think of George Clooney, I'll say, 'You know, drop-dead gorgeous, was on a big TV show... ' Until someone says his name, I can't finish my story!

As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.

Me tweeting sometimes, it's like, I don't even remember what I say. It's just coming off how it's coming off.

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

People bring up tweets that I don't even remember, and my general response is, 'I don't know if I said it. I probably said it.' It's just part of what I do.

I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.

In my novels, there are twelve ancient 'memory tools,' all now lost. Each of the 'Reincarnationist' books revolves around a different tool.

Probably the most formative experience was reading the 'Foundation' trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read, but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

When I was in my early twenties, my mom started repeating things, asking the same questions, telling the same stories. It was like, 'Oh, God, this is not right.' When I was 25, my brother and I finally told our dad we had to take her to the doctor.

As people construct a life narrative, researchers have found, they tend to remember more events from the teens and twenties than from any other time. It's called the 'reminiscence bump.'

I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story.

Twenty years from now if there is some obscure Trivial Pursuit question, I am confident I will be the answer.

My mother was murdered by my step-father, my brother's father, who was also named Joel, twenty-five years ago. Whatever sadness or burden I've been living with since then, my brother's also been living with, but he's lived with the added burden of having the exact same name as our mother's murderer.

I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one.

To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.