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The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
Peter Ackroyd
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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
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Writer
London
England
Historian
Ordinary
Almost
Experience
Whole
Make
Never
Life
Routines
More quotes by Peter Ackroyd
London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.
Peter Ackroyd
I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
Peter Ackroyd
It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?
Peter Ackroyd
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Peter Ackroyd
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Peter Ackroyd
It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.
Peter Ackroyd
There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up - at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done that.
Peter Ackroyd
If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.
Peter Ackroyd
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
Peter Ackroyd
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
Peter Ackroyd
Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Peter Ackroyd
It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.
Peter Ackroyd
There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.
Peter Ackroyd
My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.
Peter Ackroyd
To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.
Peter Ackroyd
Freud was just a novelist.
Peter Ackroyd
No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
Peter Ackroyd
I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
Peter Ackroyd
There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.
Peter Ackroyd
He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.
Peter Ackroyd
