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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
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
Presiding
Deities
England
Mother
More quotes by 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
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
Freud was just a novelist.
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
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.'
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
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
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
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.
Peter Ackroyd
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Peter Ackroyd
The best years are when you know what you're doing.
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
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
Peter Ackroyd
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Peter Ackroyd
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
Peter Ackroyd
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
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
People are much more interesting than people realise.
Peter Ackroyd
