Peter Ackroyd quotes - page 2

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
Freud was just a novelist. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
I never read in bed, only in my study. View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
People are much more interesting than people realise. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
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. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
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. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Ackroyd
I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us. View quote
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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Ackroyd