Memory Fabrication Quotes

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

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.

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.

You can do fascinating things with the tricks memory can play and tell. People can come to believe things which didn't happen at all if they're told them enough times.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

I have a strong memory of my early childhood. I can remember life before I was two. I remember being toilet-trained like it was last week - and it wasn't last week.

Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.

remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers. Our brain does that sometimes. Or at least mine does.

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.

Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.

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