Julian Barnes

Well, I can't really speak for her, but she once said to me,

when we'd been together for, I don't know, two or three years, she said, I love the way you love Pat.

And Pat had been dead for 13 years or something.

So she is remarkably open and realistic.

It doesn't mean I love her any less.

It's just that I think it's right to remember and to write about the dead.

Well, I used to believe, as I think most people do when they're young, that memory was somehow something rather stable, that it was like

You had something happen to you and you wanted to remember it.

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.