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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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
Interesting
Much
People
Realise
Realising
More quotes by Peter Ackroyd
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
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
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
Peter Ackroyd
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
Peter Ackroyd
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
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.
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
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
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
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
A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
Peter Ackroyd
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.
Peter Ackroyd
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Peter Ackroyd
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
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
I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
Peter Ackroyd
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
