Creativity Quote by Iggy Pop

A "hot memory" is the kind that runs on adrenaline, not accuracy: vivid flashes, sensory scorch marks, the stuff that fuels a performer. Iggy Pop frames recollection as combustion - useful, dangerous, and hard to control. It fits an artist whose work is practically a case study in living at the edge of the nervous system. The heat suggests immediacy and intensity, but also distortion; what burns brightest can also burn away detail.

Then he undercuts any romantic myth of total recall. "I know I've forgotten many things, too" is a blunt admission that memory is edited, not archived. The telling phrase is "just squashed things in favor of survival". That's not the gentle fading people like to imagine; it's an active, bodily verb. Squashing implies force, pressure, and a choice made under duress. The subtext is that the life he lived - chaos, touring, addiction, violence, shame, whatever particular mix applies - required selective amnesia as a coping technology. Forgetting becomes not failure but strategy.

Culturally, it's also a refusal of the rock-star autobiography that trades on complete access: the confessional that promises every debauched detail, every neat origin story. Iggy hints that the archive is compromised because the person had to stay alive. The line lands because it respects contradiction: he can remember too much and not enough at once, and the missing pieces aren't a mystery to solve but a cost of making it through.