Alain Robbe-Grillet interviewed by Shusha Guppy, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 91’, The Paris Review, 99 (1986):
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean that memory is imagination, that we invent our own life in retrospect or indeed as we go along?
ROBBE-GRILLET
Exactly. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer that records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention. In other words, inventing a character or recalling a memory is part of the same process. This is very clear in Proust: For him there is no difference between lived experience—his relationship with his mother, and so forth—and his characters. Exactly the same type of truth is involved.