Peter Ackroyd Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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It's hard to make a good movie in four weeks. It's hard. I've done it, but it's not easy.
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I consider myself as a free spokesman for the people.
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All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.
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Fear is the dark room where the Devil develops his negatives.
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I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
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I just make up lyrics off the top of my head. A lot of times, there's a phrase I really like, and I kind of build the song around that.
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And I'm not an actress. I don't think I am an actress. I think I've created a brand and a business.
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If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.
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When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.
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I am so, so lucky. I am the luckiest girl in the world, really. And still with access to everything I could possibly want I still say 'Oh dear, what am I going to wear today?' There's no ending to that question!
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I never drink anything hot; I don't like hot drinks, very strange.
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I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating.
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While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.
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I haven't been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to.
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If we can return to a government that the Founders, in their wisdom, envisioned for us, we can return to a government that will allow our economy to thrive again, and our people to live in liberty.
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It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff, writing and making movies and TV, but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.
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If you're a psychologist, you can instrumentally change peoples lives for the better. But you can only do that for about 300 people to maybe a thousand people - if you're really prolific and you're working really hard.
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If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.
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It's legendary how architectural lectures can be incredibly boring.
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We actually look to the scientific community to kind of come back to NASA and tell us what the priorities should be. And then at NASA, we try to look within our budget and say, 'What can we accommodate, and what are the most important things for the nation?'
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There's the art house movies and the action movies and the chick films. I think the same thing's happening with actors.
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Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
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The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.
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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.
