Aldous Huxley Quotes

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical.

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Biography is the best history.

I have some very good friends who've written memoirs, but it's not for me. It's just not a format that I'm interested in.

My books are, in a way, a record of my life - that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

It's kind of hard to tell your life story and state all facts and it still be sweet.

Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.

I know that it can be really difficult to read about your own life... in someone else's words.

For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.