A writer's most precious tool?

"I had started accumulating chore books some three years before, when I first realized that a perfectly reliable memory was beginning to fray, back when drawing a blank was no more than a minor nuisance and before I came to understand that the process of my forgetting things was ongoing and that if my memory continued to deteriorate at the pace at which it had advanced in these first few years, my ability to write could be gravely impaired. If one morning I should pick up the page I'd written the day before and find myself unable to remember having written it, what would I do? If I lost touch with my pages, if I could neither write a book nor read one, what would become of me? Without my work, what would be left of me?" Philip Roth, Exit Ghost. London, Jonathan Cape, 2007, pp.105-106.

What are we without our memories? What are we but our memories?

Philip Roth, 2004. Image via Vol 1 Brooklyn