Top 100 Peter Ackroyd Quotes
#1. I lack the World, for I move like a Ghost through it.
Peter Ackroyd
#2. It's only recently that we've discovered that the artist's inner self is somehow more important than the public world. I'm happier to create exterior pieces for the world rather than to express something I deeply feel or wish to say.
Peter Ackroyd
#3. He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.
Peter Ackroyd
#5. I realized that my time in this place had come to an end; now that my schooldays
were over, I no longer belonged here. I had always been a stranger and, if I
stayed, I would become a stranger to myself as well.
Peter Ackroyd
#6. The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William.
Peter Ackroyd
#7. Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money.
Peter Ackroyd
#8. I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
Peter Ackroyd
#9. Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Peter Ackroyd
#10. Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again.
Peter Ackroyd
#11. Truly Time is a vast Denful of Horrour, round about which a Serpent winds and in the winding bites itself by the Tail. Now, now is the Hour, every Hour, every part of an Hour, every Moment, which in its end does begin again and never ceases to end: a beginning continuing, always ending.
Peter Ackroyd
#12. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#13. I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
Peter Ackroyd
#14. ... sorrow was always the bedfellow of depravity.
Peter Ackroyd
#16. All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris.
Peter Ackroyd
#17. The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.
Peter Ackroyd
#18. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#19. London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
Peter Ackroyd
#20. I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time.
Peter Ackroyd
#22. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#23. The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.
Peter Ackroyd
#24. Lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their solitary rooms.
Peter Ackroyd
#25. Worshipped was that of Mammon. It is difficult to estimate the size of monastic occupation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land, but it may be safe to presume that the monks controlled one sixth of English territory.
Peter Ackroyd
#26. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#27. What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?
Peter Ackroyd
#28. There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.
Peter Ackroyd
#29. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#30. Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.
Peter Ackroyd
#31. It is a dreadfull thing to look down Praecipices.
Peter Ackroyd
#32. I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
Peter Ackroyd
#33. 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
#34. It is the nature of humankind to idealize, to indulge in excessive praise as well as unjust condemnation.
Peter Ackroyd
#35. ... a lie, once uttered, changes reality just as surely as if it were a great truth.
Peter Ackroyd
#36. 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
#38. My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.
Peter Ackroyd
#39. Thomas More rarely discussed his siblings, and two of them are never mentioned by him. It is likely that they were part of that infant mortality which had provoked such concern for early baptism.
Peter Ackroyd
#40. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#41. Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Peter Ackroyd
#42. In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.
Peter Ackroyd
#43. I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.'
Peter Ackroyd
#44. For who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?
Peter Ackroyd
#45. The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
Peter Ackroyd
#46. There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
Peter Ackroyd
#47. Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.
Peter Ackroyd
#48. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#49. Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?
For ever in the same track - for ever at the same pace?
Peter Ackroyd
#50. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#51. Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.
Peter Ackroyd
#52. Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than
anything else.
Peter Ackroyd
#53. I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
Peter Ackroyd
#54. Never be curious. It is the path to perdition.
Peter Ackroyd
#55. Lord, decked with jewels, sitting at the head of a table. It is a poetry of assonance
Peter Ackroyd
#56. I believe now that there can be no real sense of loss or seperation without
the recognition of death; we were too young to consider any such eventuality,
and simply moved on with our lives into some indefinite but illimitable future.
Peter Ackroyd
#57. If I were a Writer now, I would wish to thicken the water of my Discourse so that it was no longer easy or familiar. I would chuse a huge lushious Style!
Peter Ackroyd
#58. Time. In another time. Either before or after. They were not stars,
but fires. They were the souls of birds. They were entries into the
vast fire. They were the eyes of the dead. And in the darkness they
were imprisoned by them.
Peter Ackroyd
#59. Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
Peter Ackroyd
#60. As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.
Peter Ackroyd
#61. I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
Peter Ackroyd
#62. 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
#63. A woman is a deep Ditch, said he, her House inclines to Death and her Paths unto the Devil
Peter Ackroyd
#64. Well,' said Hawksmoor. 'It's a theory and a theory can do no harm.
Peter Ackroyd
#65. It is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it.
Peter Ackroyd
#66. None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.
Peter Ackroyd
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
Peter Ackroyd
#70. The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.
Peter Ackroyd
#71. 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
#72. The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
Peter Ackroyd
#73. The Gulphe in which truth lies is bottomless and it will wash over whatever is thrown into it.
Peter Ackroyd
#74. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#75. In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that 'queen Katherine is the true queen of England
Peter Ackroyd
#76. The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.
Peter Ackroyd
#77. Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.
Peter Ackroyd
#78. Destruction is like a snow-ball rolled down a Hill, for its Bulk encreases by its own swiftness and thus Disorder spreads.
Peter Ackroyd
#79. And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside
a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted
to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in
for ever.
Peter Ackroyd
#80. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#81. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#82. He had been living in the dark world of his anxieties, and no infliction of reality could seem more terrible than that
Peter Ackroyd
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.
Peter Ackroyd
#86. And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver'd of a Child without a Head. So lives the Power of Imagination even in this Rationall Age.
Peter Ackroyd
#88. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#89. So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are
unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.
Peter Ackroyd
#90. Those in their snug Bed-chambers may call the Fears of Night meer Bugbears, but their Minds have not pierced into the Horror of the World which others, who are adrift upon it, know.
Peter Ackroyd
#91. His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr.
Peter Ackroyd
#92. People are much more interesting than people realise.
Peter Ackroyd
#93. 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
#94. One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.
Peter Ackroyd
#95. To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.
Peter Ackroyd
#96. Without thought he repeated some words which a boy had once chalked on the blackboard between lessons: 'A lump of coal is better than nothing. Nothing is better than God. Therefore a lump of coal is better than God'. And then he traced his own name with his finger on the cracked and broken floor.
Peter Ackroyd
#97. Let Stone be your God and you will find God in the Stone.
Peter Ackroyd
#98. Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I'm writing them. For instance, when I was writing 'Doctor Dee,' I believed in magic. And when I wrote 'Hawksmoor' I believed in psychic geography. But as soon as I type the last full stop, I'm back to being a complete blank again.
Peter Ackroyd
#99. The best years are when you know what you're doing.
Peter Ackroyd
#100. Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain.
Peter Ackroyd
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
