Top 100 Peter Ackroyd Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The value is always in the eye of the beholder. What is worthless to one person may be very important to someone else.”

— Peter Ackroyd

2. “I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.”

— Peter Ackroyd

3. “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

4. “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

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5. “Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.”

— Peter Ackroyd

6. “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

7. “The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.”

— Peter Ackroyd

8. “Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money.”

— Peter Ackroyd

9. “Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.”

— Peter Ackroyd

10. “London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.”

— Peter Ackroyd

11. “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

12. “Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.”

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

14. “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

15. “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

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

— 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 am the scourge of God.”

— Peter Ackroyd

19. “Let Stone be your God and you will find God in the Stone.”

— Peter Ackroyd

20. “The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.”

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

22. “Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.”

— Peter Ackroyd

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “I never read in bed, only in my study.”

— Peter Ackroyd

28. “It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in ‘The Battle of Maldon’ where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered – ‘Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less’. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.”

— Peter Ackroyd

29. “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

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

— Peter Ackroyd

31. “He felt at peace only in the hour before dawn, when the darkness seemed to give way slowly to a mist, and it was at this hour that he would wake and sit by his window.”

— Peter Ackroyd

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.”

— Peter Ackroyd

35. “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

36. “It is the nature of humankind to idealize, to indulge in excessive praise as well as unjust condemnation.”

— Peter Ackroyd

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.”

— Peter Ackroyd

40. “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

41. “One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one’s own bad lines.”

— Peter Ackroyd

42. “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

43. “If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean.”

— Peter Ackroyd

44. “The less you see, the more you can imagine.”

— Peter Ackroyd

45. “To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.”

— Peter Ackroyd

46. “I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.”

— Peter Ackroyd

47. “He visited the country house of a goldsmith, Sir Robert Viner, where ‘he showed me a black boy that he had that died of a consumption; and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box’.”

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

49. “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

50. “But didn’t you know? Everything is made up.”

— Peter Ackroyd