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I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.

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
Courses
Course
Sense
Think
Thinking
Celebrity

More quotes by 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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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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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
Peter Ackroyd
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In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.
Peter Ackroyd
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I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.
Peter Ackroyd
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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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In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.
Peter Ackroyd
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London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Peter Ackroyd
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I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
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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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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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
Peter Ackroyd
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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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Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Peter Ackroyd
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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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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
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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.
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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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
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Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
Peter Ackroyd