John Irving Quotes

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and, at that same point, it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations.

For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

Short term memory is not good.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.

'Mnemonic' is a play about memory.

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

I can remember weird things from way back, but not what I had for breakfast.

I have a really terrible memory.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

Why do we remember stuff from when we were 5 years old but not important facts that are more recent?

I've got a short memory span.

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.'