Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

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

Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

The idea that there is a rational truth out there that is not embodied in a person's politics is something I can't understand or subscribe to.

The past has infinite value if one learns from it.

It's an odd experience reading interviews with yourself. Interesting, though. Of course, you know that the journalist will have edited, rephrased or even rewritten what you actually said, but you can't help feeling that there's a special kind of truth in the way someone else paints you, however subjective they might be.

In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

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

The way we remember people, even their beauty is all so subjective and a matter of perspective.

I believe we need to learn from our past.

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.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.