Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

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.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

'Mnemonic' is a play about memory.

I remember everything from 1976. I remember I was 14, and I remember my routines.

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.

A story is ultimately a memory. It's important when you're telling a story to think about why this memory is a memory. You don't remember everything in life; you just remember certain things - so, why this one?

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.

We all remember things, it's what we remember that determines how we live.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

I don’t remember.

How we experience memory sometimes, it's not linear. We're not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we're just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

I've always been fascinated by memory and I remember Jonah, when we first started dating, was working on something involving memory. It was early on in our relationship and I was like, damn it, I wanted to do a movie on memory. That was 'Memento.'

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

In the years that I have been an actress, I have told the story of my life many times, and I get tired of it, so sometimes I change it a little. That is, I change the mood. If I am feeling sad, then I remember to tell only the sad things. If I am feeling happy, then I can remember only to tell all the good things.

I like to make little movies or fake stories about something that happened in my life. I will make a movie in my mind that would translate the same feeling or emotion that I had in whatever just happened.