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It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.
Peter Ackroyd
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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
Real
Consequence
Unintended
Courses
Pattern
Course
Accident
Chance
Consequences
History
Confusion
Seems
Accidents
Whole
Patterns
Sometimes
English
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
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
The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
Peter Ackroyd
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
Peter Ackroyd
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
Peter Ackroyd
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
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
He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.
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
I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
Peter Ackroyd
The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
Peter Ackroyd
I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
Peter Ackroyd
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