John Banville Quotes

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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

Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It's a creative process.

There is no memory or retentive faculty based on lasting impression. What we designate as memory is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.

I have a great memory.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

Memory. My poison, my food.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

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.

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

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.

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

I've been around a long time, and I've been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory.

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 don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

The hippocampus helps record both types of memories initially, and it helps retain them for the medium term. The hippocampus also helps us access old personal memories in long-term storage in other parts of the brain.