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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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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
Books
Within
Living
Character
Provided
Book
Landscape
Always
London
Becomes
Imagination

More quotes by Peter Ackroyd

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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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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 don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
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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 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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Freud was just a novelist.
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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 don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
Peter Ackroyd
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There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
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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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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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
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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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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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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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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London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
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