Top 100 Peter Ackroyd Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Peter Ackroyd

53. “Without thought he repeated some words which a boy had once chalked on the blackboard between lessons: ‘A lump of coal is better than nothing. Nothing is better than God. Therefore a lump of coal is better than God’. And then he traced his own name with his finger on the cracked and broken floor.”

— Peter Ackroyd

54. “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.”

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

56. “The credulity of crowds is never-ending.”

— Peter Ackroyd

57. “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

58. “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.”

— Peter Ackroyd

59. “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.”

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

61. “And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver’d of a Child without a Head. So lives the Power of Imagination even in this Rationall Age.”

— Peter Ackroyd

62. “I need to know when,′ he said, ‘In this case when is more important than how. Do you have a time-table?’ For although images of this murder now surrounded him, and the parts of the body had become emblems of pursuit, violence and flight, they were as broken and indistinct as the sounds of a quarrel in a locked room.”

— Peter Ackroyd

63. “Truly Time is a vast Denful of Horrour, round about which a Serpent winds and in the winding bites itself by the Tail. Now, now is the Hour, every Hour, every part of an Hour, every Moment, which in its end does begin again and never ceases to end: a beginning continuing, always ending.”

— Peter Ackroyd

64. “It is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it.”

— Peter Ackroyd

65. “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

66. “Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?”

— Peter Ackroyd

67. “The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.”

— Peter Ackroyd

68. “This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte.”

— Peter Ackroyd

69. “The English seem to relish unsystematic learning of this kind, in the same manner that they embarked upon “Grand Tours” of Europe in pursuit of a peripatetic scholarship.”

— Peter Ackroyd

70. “There is no real origin for anything. Everything just exists. Everything just exists in order to exist.”

— Peter Ackroyd

71. “The best years are when you know what you’re doing.”

— Peter Ackroyd

72. “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

73. “And we recall in Dickens’ fiction how universal it is that a child looks after an adult, and how the adult remains so dependent upon the child that he becomes something worse than child-like.”

— Peter Ackroyd

74. “Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.”

— Peter Ackroyd

75. “The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.”

— Peter Ackroyd

76. “The fall of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced.”

— Peter Ackroyd

77. “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

78. “But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.”

— Peter Ackroyd

79. “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

80. “Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell? A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow’s nose. Your best friend is still alive. Who is that? You. The sun is none the worse for shining on a dunghill. He must needs swim that is borne up to the chin. An hour’s cold will suck out seven years of heat.”

— Peter Ackroyd

81. “There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.”

— Peter Ackroyd

82. “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.”

— Peter Ackroyd

83. “Those in their snug Bed-chambers may call the Fears of Night meer Bugbears, but their Minds have not pierced into the Horror of the World which others, who are adrift upon it, know.”

— Peter Ackroyd

84. “The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.”

— Peter Ackroyd

85. “I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable.”

— Peter Ackroyd

86. “I asked him what he said, for there was such a mish-mash of Conversation around us that I could scarcely understand him – the frequenters of Taverns have Hearts of Curd and Souls of Milk Sop, but they have Mouths like Cannons which stink of Tobacco and their own foul Breath as they cry What News? What’s a Clock? Methinks it’s Cold to Day! Thus is it a Hospital For Fools.”

— Peter Ackroyd

87. “People are much more interesting than people realise.”

— Peter Ackroyd

88. “Destruction is like a snow-ball rolled down a Hill, for its Bulk encreases by its own swiftness and thus Disorder spreads.”

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

91. “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

92. “He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.”

— Peter Ackroyd

93. “When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.”

— Peter Ackroyd

94. “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

95. “A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.”

— Peter Ackroyd

96. “It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one’s soul so much that they adore one’s body also?”

— Peter Ackroyd

97. “DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.”

— Peter Ackroyd

98. “The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William.”

— Peter Ackroyd

99. “Those who wander are always objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear.”

— Peter Ackroyd

100. “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