Gore Vidal Quotes

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

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.

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

Memories contain hidden editorials on current events.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

There is nothing that makes a man more self-satisfied than a poor memory.

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 never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.