Washington Irving Quotes

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

We're all building our narratives in our heads.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

I never know how much of what I say is true.

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your beliefs.

Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.

Whatever one believes to be true either is true or becomes true in one's mind.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

But why should I read what somebody else thinks of my life when I know the real story?

You know, we're each the hero of our own story and we perceive what's going on around us, and especially in a relationship, from the kind of viewpoint of, 'Well, this is my story, and I'm the hero of that, and I justify what I do around it.'

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

People believe what they want to believe.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

Some of the things I've said, I don't even agree with.

I think everyone self-mythologizes.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

We're not really allowed to admit that, maybe as humans, sometimes we need to revise our own histories and frame things in a more positive light than is true.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

I know I am delusional at times, but I'm not completely-out-of-touch delusional.