Julian Barnes

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.

Everything that happened to us is up there.

So it's a question of what the brain lets us know and lets us see.

So I thought of the comparison with spy fiction, with John le Carré.

We're like an agent running in the field and the brain is like the spy center, the control.