Peter Ackroyd quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Peter Ackroyd on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time.

Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

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

Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money.

... sorrow was always the bedfellow of depravity.

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.

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

Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?

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

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

Never be curious. It is the path to perdition.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than
anything else.

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

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world,
interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.

I am the scourge of God

Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

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

He had been living in the dark world of his anxieties, and no infliction of reality could seem more terrible than that

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

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.

... a lie, once uttered, changes reality just as surely as if it were a great truth.

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

Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.

The best years are when you know what you're doing.

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

Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

There was no grandeur here, no sublimity, only weariness and gloom.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

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

London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.

There is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancy of dress.

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

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

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.

It is a dreadfull thing to look down Praecipices.

Freud was just a novelist.

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

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.

He found it difficult to discuss any of his activities, which seemed to him no more than the hole through which he was falling.

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

Lord, decked with jewels, sitting at the head of a table. It is a poetry of assonance

For who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?

Well,' said Hawksmoor. 'It's a theory and a theory can do no harm.

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.

I never read in bed, only in my study.

The Gulphe in which truth lies is bottomless and it will wash over whatever is thrown into it.

The credulity of crowds is never-ending.

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.

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

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

Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?
For ever in the same track - for ever at the same pace?

A woman is a deep Ditch, said he, her House inclines to Death and her Paths unto the Devil

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

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

I lack the World, for I move like a Ghost through it.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Glass is material sea.

To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

People are much more interesting than people realise.

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