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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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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
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London
England
Believe
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Beliefs
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Peggy
More quotes by Peter Ackroyd
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
Peter Ackroyd
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.
Peter Ackroyd
People are much more interesting than people realise.
Peter Ackroyd
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
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
Peter Ackroyd
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.
Peter Ackroyd
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
Peter Ackroyd
A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
Peter Ackroyd
You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.
Peter Ackroyd
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
Peter Ackroyd
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
Peter Ackroyd
