I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval.
There was a kind of infiniteness to fiction that I found sort of... disconcerting. I remember having these really panicky thoughts, like, 'I can make this person say anything. I could make him do anything! I could put a jetpack onto his back and shoot him into space!' I don't like this feeling of having no rules.
So often, we take photos on our iPhone, and then they're gone in a year, and we don't even remember them. I like to experience life and disconnect from that.
I remember teachers who really singled me out for their discouragement.
When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.
I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader - I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.
It was dripping and, you know, and there was a whole line of cameras and microphones. I felt like - you remember the honor guards, only it was a dishonor guard.
I remember my school had some of the first Apple IIs in North Carolina. I remember, when I first started using them, we were using a cassette tape to store programs because we didn't have floppy disk drives.
I can remember - I don't want to identify the individual - but a very prominent Democrat, who compared looking at Carter and then Reagan, and then Bush, and observed that many of the people around Carter were totally disloyal to him.
I still remember my dismay in the summer of 2007 when - for the first time in the history of planet Earth - America's share of auto production dropped below 50 percent.
The hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself. One doesn't like to remember unpleasant details, but forgetting them makes one's life seem disorganized.
We had our first earthquake over here recently. That was a bizarre feeling. I just became disoriented and I remember my dad freaking out. Nothing broke or anything.
I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!
Storytelling is a universal: every culture does it. There's a reason our religious books aren't simply a list of shall-and-shall-nots. Morals and teachings are contained in stories, which are studied, dissected, and passed down; we remember stories in a way we don't remember lists of facts.
Remember my mantra: distinct... or extinct.
Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.
Right now, when we're hearing so much disturbing and hateful rhetoric, it is so important to remember that our diversity has been - and will always be - our greatest source of strength and pride here in the United States.
I remember going to my school careers advisor and asked about jobs that required scuba divers. It was a phase.
The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
