Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of… — Philip Roth

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.