Julian Barnes

And so you took it along to, you know, one of those storage units which are along the sides of lots of main roads and outside city centres.

And you deposited it there.

And then when you needed that memory, you went there.

You opened the box.

You took it out.

And there it was.

As pure and as truthful as when you put it in.

I went along with this sort of view of memory for quite a long time until I realized that actually memory deteriorates like everything else.

And that in fact the more times...

You tell a story.

The more times you subtly alter it, the more times you make yourself come out of it a little better or you add a joke and so on and so forth.

So you could say that your best memories, the ones you're fondest of, are your least reliable memories.

Yes, yes, that's right.

It's sort of our relationship with the brain is very strange.

You know, how do we have a relationship with our brain when everything that we need to have that relationship is inside the brain anyway?

It's very paradoxical.

And, you know, in the book, I go through various sort of metaphors or versions of what it's like

to receive memories from the brain.

And the one I come up with eventually is it's like spy fiction.

Freud said that everything was up there.