Peter Ackroyd Quotes

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

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.

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

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

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

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

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.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.

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

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.

There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

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.

I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.

I never read in bed, only in my study.

I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.

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.

So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.

A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.

Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.

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.

When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.

I don't know if I have a voice of my own. I don't see me being an important person with something to say. I haven't. I've got nothing to say. My opinion is of no consequence or value.

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.

I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.

Freud was just a novelist.

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.

The best years are when you know what you're doing.

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.

In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.

London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.

People are much more interesting than people realise.

Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?

Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.

The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page