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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
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
Suppose
Belief
Song
Else
Going
Something
Peggy
Believe
Pretend
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Beliefs

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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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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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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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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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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
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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 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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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
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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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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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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
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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 don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
Peter Ackroyd
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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
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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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Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Peter Ackroyd
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
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