Salman Rushdie Quotes

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

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

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.

No two people have the same reality

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

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

The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience.

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

When someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they're telling me about themselves.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

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

There are as many "real worlds" as there are people!

What you think is real is your reality.

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology.