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Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?

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
Nostalgic
Fears
Possible

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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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Freud was just a novelist.
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
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I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
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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.
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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?
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
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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.
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If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.
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The best years are when you know what you're doing.
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