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And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup.'

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
Clothes
Scent
Creating
Described
Unwashed
Social
Soup
Odour
Body
Chief
Musty
Always
Chiefs
Keener
Bodies
Librarian
Smell
Steam
Library
Mixed

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Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
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London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
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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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I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
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Freud was just a novelist.
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Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.
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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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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 don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
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The best years are when you know what you're doing.
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To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.
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I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
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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 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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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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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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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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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.
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