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I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

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
Around
Past
Believe
Necessarily
Eternal

More quotes by Peter Ackroyd

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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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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
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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
Peter Ackroyd
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London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Peter Ackroyd
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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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The best years are when you know what you're doing.
Peter Ackroyd
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People are much more interesting than people realise.
Peter Ackroyd
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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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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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Murderers will try to recall the sequence of events, they will remember exactly what they did just before and just after. But they can never remember the actual moment of killing. This is why they will always leave a clue.
Peter Ackroyd
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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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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?
Peter Ackroyd
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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
Peter Ackroyd
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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
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
Peter Ackroyd
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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
Peter Ackroyd
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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Peter Ackroyd