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.

Roth is stressing that “facts” do not arrive in consciousness as neutral data; they are filtered, selected, and shaped by the imagination, which itself has been trained by prior experience, desire, fear, and habit. The second sentence pushes further: what we call memory is not a stored archive of objective events but a recollection of earlier mental constructions—our past interpretations, images, and narratives about what happened. The remark aligns with Roth’s recurring literary preoccupation with the instability of autobiography and the way personal and national histories are continually rewritten by the self. It also implies an ethical caution: certainty about one’s own past may be more a product of storytelling than of truth.