Pete Docter Quotes

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

I have a daughter, and fairies meant a lot to her growing up.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up, I liked Dr. Seuss.

I have very vivid memories of my mother reading to us as kids.

There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.

When you write fiction, you're like a bird making a nest. You remember every little story ever told you. It's funny how things come back to you.

I started re-reading 'Harry Potter' just to throw myself back into my childhood. I forgot how awesome the books are.

I grew up in a haunted house, reading Dr. Seuss.

I'm so attached to Patsy and her crew, and to the adventures we've taken them on.

All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

It's like I'm stuck in a time bubble. Memories keep coming back, and of course, memories are a huge part of literature and cinema, from "Stand by Me" to "Blade Runner."

I'll be a story in your head. That's okay. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? 'Cause it was, you know. It was the best. The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away. Did I ever tell you that I stole it? Well I borrowed it. I was always going to take it back.

I don't know what's my first real memory. When you're little, you're always looking forward to days that are special, like Christmas, birthdays, the Fourth of July, and family gatherings. But I can't pinpoint my earliest memory.

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

I sometimes feel fiction is the ideal preservation for real memories. Fiction is such a good place to keep things.

A good story's like a door, and you can go through it whenever you need to. After you've read it or seen it or heard it, you can still go back through it. Once it's yours, it's always yours.

What I would do is I would just remember the scene and I'd go home and I'd write out the scene from memory. And anything I didn't remember I would just fill in the blanks myself and then go and give it to a classmate and then we'd do it.