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What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.

Peter Ackroyd

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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
Romance
Begins
Irishmen
Land
Captivity
Left
Exile
Become
Irish
Home
Jews
Really
Native
People
Jew

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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
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I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.
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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
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Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
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London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
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There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
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I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
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I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
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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.
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Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
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I wanted to be a poet when I was 20 I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
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I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.
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It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?
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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.
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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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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.
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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.
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
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The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.
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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.
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