Peter Ackroyd Quotes

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Peter Ackroyd

Profession : Author

Birth : October 5, 1949

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

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.

Peter Ackroyd

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

Peter Ackroyd

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.

Peter Ackroyd

People are much more interesting than people realise.

Peter Ackroyd

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.

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

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

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

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

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

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

Peter Ackroyd

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

Peter Ackroyd