Retrospective Insight Quotes

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

I found my childhood scrapbook and there's an interview in there with dad from 1970. He talks about how long he's been playing the drums and he'd only been playing drums six years in 1970.

Th'invention all admir'd, and each, how he to be th'inventor miss'd; so easy it seem'd once found, which yet unfound most would have thought impossible.

People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.

Literature is always about bygone times. It's always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

. . . hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.

I still remember my quote from the 2007 World Cup, when I said scoring two threes was as good as hitting a six. That was me trying to justify what you couldn't. To me, and this was before I became director of cricket, we just couldn't do that again.

When you go through life ... it all seems accidental at the time it is happening. Then when you get on in your 60s or 70s and look back, your life looks like a well-planned novel with a coherent theme ... Incidents that seemed accidental, pure chance, turn out to be major elements in the structuring of this novel. Schopenhauer says, 'Who wrote this novel? You did.'

I had a pretty hilariously gloomy few years in the '70s.

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.

Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.

When I won Miss World, I wasn't even 18, and I only remember, like, I thought of it as a day in the races or something. It didn't feel like it was Miss World of the Millennium Year, the change of the century. I didn't understand the magnitude of it for at least a couple of years.

The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside.

I remember listening to Sugar Free and Jay Z and I never really understood some of the stuff they used to say until years later. Then you hear it again like, Damn that's crazy. I just got what he's talking about.

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.

There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.

London 2012 was the biggest thing I will probably ever do, but I didn't realise it at the time!

In the garden of our house, when I was three. My brothers and I had a jumping wall. I remember it as enormously high, but it was probably only about a foot and a half.

I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable.

It's funny how the present can change the past.