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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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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
Like
Completely
Inside
Head
Forget
Whizzing
Around
Tunes
Character
Finished
Many
Soon
Writing
Characters

More quotes by Peter Ackroyd

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London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
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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.
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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.
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I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
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Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
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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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The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
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Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
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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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Freud was just a novelist.
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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.'
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The best years are when you know what you're doing.
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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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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
Peter Ackroyd
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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
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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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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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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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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