Aminatta Forna Quotes

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

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.

The past is what the past is.

Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

The past is where its supposed to be.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I enjoy looking back on my life. I'm thinking seriously about starting to write about it.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that's often why they don't match when we've shared the same experiences with someone.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

Of my infancy I can speak little, only I do remember that in the fourth year of my age I had the measles.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up.

I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.

I told my whole life story in my book.

By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.