A Quote by David Shields

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

David Shields

Quote Topics

Anything Fiction Memory Processed

Quote Author

David Shields
American - Author
Born: July 22, 1956

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

Haruki Murakami

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

John Cusack

As you may know, my motto is: "All memory is fiction." It could just as easily be: "All fiction is memory." Unpacked, these two statements defy the ease of logic, but offer some really important truths about narrative art, at the very least, and about memory. So I would say that all art is personal.

Kwame Dawes

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

P. D. James

The playing field is anything but level when you walk into the grocery store. So much government subsidy goes into processed foods. Even when you're well-meaning as a parent or a shopper for yourself, you can't help but be pulled toward the highly processed food.

Michael Moss

Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.

Isabel Allende

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

Francisco Goldman

Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.

Saul Steinberg

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

Haruki Murakami

I don't eat anything processed.

Christina Anstead

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Ayelet Waldman

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'

Tao Lin

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

Ray Bradbury

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.