Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Quotes

I realized - and I am probably the last person in the world to realize this - that we live our lives with no editing.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.

Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

We are never aware of the present; each instant of living becomes perceptible only when it is past, so that in a sense we do not live at all, but only remember living.

Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it.

Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever?

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.