Haruki Murakami Quotes

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

I think memories are like dreams. Not reliable proof of anything. I can't prove a memory any more than I can prove a dream.

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

There are always three sides to every memory…yours, theirs, and the truth, which lies somewhere in between the two

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

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.

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

You know the movie "Rashomon" from [Takeshi] Kurosawa, when all the people in the forest see something different? Each performance was like that.

there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

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

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.

Every character sees the world through a framework of education and experience that they're proud experts about. To write a character, find out what they know best, and THEN you'll know how they'll describe a "hot day." Or a "pretty girl."

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.