Archiving Quotes

I've never kept a record of anything.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.

In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be archived.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

In addition to being a writer, I'm a librarian - professionally trained and everything.

But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

I know that collector types can be a pain in the neck and seem perpetually frozen in time - or at least in their parents' basement - but someone has to look out for the past, lest it slip away forever.

I save everything. I have these carefully organized file boxes. Somewhere in there is a section of the 'New York Times' where I wrote 'The Border Guard' in the margin.

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

Librarian of Congress: It's a librarian's dream.

At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

A library is thought in cold storage.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

Records just happen.

Michael Cohen is one of the world's greatest evidence hoarders. He rarely threw anything away.

I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

The physical world is not going away, just items take on different meaning. Paper takes on this archival, very important meaning now that it's not the only way to communicate something.

Film, if properly cared for, will last almost 100 years, but digital will not.

I really don’t make history; I preserve it.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.