Peter Ackroyd Quotes

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Peter Ackroyd

Profession : Author

Birth : October 5, 1949

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

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

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

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

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

Freud was just a novelist.

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

Peter Ackroyd

I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity. Ambition. That's it. Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell.

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never read in bed, only in my study.

Peter Ackroyd

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

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

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

Peter Ackroyd