Marlon Brando: Memory Is Art
You can't dispute or over-analyze a memory. A memory is not a fact; it is not reality. Memory is the area in which we are all artists, because we take our histories and we present them--first to ourselves, and then to others--as we remember them. We are not wrong, nor are we necessarily right. We are merely human, and the first canvas upon which we all throw our art is the memory.
Stella [Adler] would always pound it into me that I had to stop being too literal, too dependent on what was fact. Learn the facts of a character, but then the performance is my memory of what I learned. This is how you make a character, a life, a day, anything, your own.
Memory is art. There are a million ways of looking at it.
Marlon Brando
Interview with James Grissom/1990