Gunter Grass Quotes

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances

Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.

Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day - and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.

I can remember weird things from way back, but not what I had for breakfast.

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

People only remember what they want to remember.