Peter Ackroyd Quotes - Page 2

People are much more interesting than people realise.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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 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.

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

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

I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.

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.

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.

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

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.

I never read in bed, only in my study.

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

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.

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

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.