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Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae' for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again.

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
Father
Page
Noted
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Lawyer
Remarkably
Years
John
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Thomas
Moved
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Geoffrey
Year
Blank
Inexact
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Natal

More quotes by 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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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
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Freud was just a novelist.
Peter Ackroyd
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
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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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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I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
Peter Ackroyd
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I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
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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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
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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 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
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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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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
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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.
Peter Ackroyd
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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
Peter Ackroyd
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People are much more interesting than people realise.
Peter Ackroyd
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In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.
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