Julian Barnes Quotes

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

Take a person’s memories, and you change who they are.

Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

we are nothing more than the sum of our memories and experiences

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Things like the movie 'Memento' are interesting to me because our memories of the things we've done and how we've behaved form our notion of who we are, what our character is. So if part of that were missing, what does that actually say about you? And what does it say about your sense of responsibility for things if you can't remember them?

How do we define, how do we describe, how do we explain and/or understand ourselves? What sort of creatures do we take ourselves to be? What are we? Who are we? Why are we? How do we come to be what or who we are or take ourselves to be? How do we give an account of ourselves? How do we account for ourselves, our actions, interactions, transactions (praxis), our biologic processes? Our specific human existence?

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.

What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?

Depending on their fondest memory of you, most people hold on so tightly to their fondest memory they don’t usually let you be anything greater than that. And that’s one of the things I think I allowed myself to be a victim of earlier in my career. What I learned as I got older is I decide. I decide what it’s like for me, not other people. You can be whatever you’d like to be. You just have to choose it.