Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
Like
Completely
Inside
Head
Forget
Whizzing
Around
Tunes
Character
Finished
Many
Soon
Writing
Characters

More quotes by Peter Ackroyd

Image
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
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.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
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
Image
London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
People are much more interesting than people realise.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
Peter Ackroyd