You think about some of the most memorable meals you've ever had the food will be good but it will often be about locating a mental memory and taste is inexorably linked to all the other senses and memory so ultimately it is all about taste.

The secret of food lies in memory - of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.

I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.

And if the great fear had not come upon me as it did and forced me to do my duty I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all even with the memory of so great a vision in me.

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

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.

The first pages of memory are like the old family Bible. The first leaves are wholly faded and somewhat soiled with handling. But when we turn further and come to the chapters where Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise then all begins to grow clear and legible.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up because you're filling in spaces.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.