Art & Creativity Quote by Andre Maurois

Memory doesn’t just lie, Maurois suggests; it curates. Calling it “a great artist” is a sly compliment that immediately turns into an indictment: art is selection, emphasis, composition. It’s the cutting-room floor as much as the final film. By pairing “work of art” with “an unfaithful record,” Maurois pins down the unnerving bargain at the heart of selfhood: the very mechanism that gives your life coherence is the one most willing to distort it.

The line works because it flatters the reader’s inner storyteller while quietly discrediting the story. “For every man and for every woman” makes the phenomenon democratic and inescapable; no one gets an unedited archive. Memory becomes a collaborator in identity, constantly revising motivations, sanding down contradictions, turning accidents into destiny. The subtext is not simply that we forget details, but that we retroactively design meaning. We don’t recall who we were; we draft a version that can be lived with.

Maurois, writing in a 20th-century Europe preoccupied with autobiography, psychology, and the fragility of testimony, lands on a modernist insight: the self is partly a narrative effect. His phrasing also anticipates a postwar skepticism about “records” of any kind, when propaganda and mass media demonstrated how easily facts can be arranged into persuasive fictions. The sting is that the most persuasive fiction is private, authored inside your own head, signed with your own name.