I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.

I only see clearly what I remember.

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

There is no memory or retentive faculty based on lasting impression. What we designate as memory is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention, but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t ruled politics out.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

I’ve got a terrible memory; it’s probably because I’m always concentrating on what I’m doing now.

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

I mean, I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I’m me.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

I’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

I think that I’ve had a very strange life.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

The flesh, or human nature, is generally lazy and self-centered.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Throughout my life, I’ve always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.