Creative Memory Quotes

I want the recording process to be a time in my life that I will remember.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time - or better - the experience of color coming slowly out of the tube - is with me to this day.

Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.

The best thing about making films is the time spent making them. When I see works that I've made, I always think what a great time I had making them. The films remind me of that time.

Every single time I perform 'River,' I just feel a huge rush of adrenaline and energy, and I remember writing it.

I am not naturally inclined to history or geography - maybe that's why I like to sing about it, because it helps me remember.

Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.

To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do.

Stand still, true poet that you are! I know you; let me try and draw you. Some night you'll fail us: when afar You rise, remember one man saw you, Knew you, and named a star!

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

It's funny to see the finished product of a movie, stuff that's so beautiful, and to remember the particulars.

I remember very little about writing the first series of 'Hitchhiker's.' It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

The imagination never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.

Sometimes readers are telling me about what they read of my books and I don't remember at all.

Sometimes an idea from six years ago will come to me out of the blue. And maybe I haven't even seen the lyrics I wrote down, but I'll just have this physical memory of having written it, and in my mind I can see the piece of paper, and the words I wrote down, and then by muscle memory, I'll remember the chords that go along with it.

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.

Moments when the original 'poet' in each of us created the outside world for us, by finding the familiar in the unfamiliar, are perhaps forgotten by most people; or else they are guarded in some secret place of memory because they were too much like visitations by the gods to be mixed with everyday thinking.