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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

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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
Social
Soup
Odour
Body
Chief
Musty
Always
Chiefs
Keener
Bodies
Librarian
Smell
Steam
Library
Mixed
Clothes
Scent
Creating
Described
Unwashed

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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.
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It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?
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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.
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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
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A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
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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.
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I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
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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.
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There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
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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.
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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.
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London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
Peter Ackroyd
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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
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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
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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
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The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
Peter Ackroyd
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I wanted to be a poet when I was 20 I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
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I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.
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I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
Peter Ackroyd
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Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Peter Ackroyd