Feel Quotes

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Peter Ackroyd

British

October 5, 1949

Author

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I never read in bed, only in my study.

Tags: Never Only Read

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I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Tags: Us Believe Around

I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.

Tags: Time About Out

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Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

Tags: Death Me Will

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.

Tags: Like About Who

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.

Tags: Time Like Think

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.

Tags: History Life Had

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.

Tags: Just Always Will

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.

Tags: Always Been Years

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.

Tags: You People Up

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

Tags: Work Nature Only