Peter Ackroyd · 185 pages
Rating: (462 votes)
“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, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I drink it, I understand the symbolic mysteries of odour and of colour.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Peter Ackroyd
Born place: in East Acton, London, The United Kingdom
Born date October 5, 1949
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― Nikki Sex, quote from Abuse
“Through my history's despite
and ruin, I have come
to its remainder, and here
have made the beginning
of a farm intended to become
my art of being here.
By it I would instruct
my wants: they should belong
to each other and to this place.
Until my song comes here
to learn its words, my art
is but the hope of song.
(Part 2 from History is Clearing, p 174)”
― Wendell Berry, quote from The Collected Poems, 1957-1982
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