Quote

Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?

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
Fears
Possible
Nostalgic

More quotes by Peter Ackroyd

Image
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
Image
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
Image
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
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
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
Image
The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
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
A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Peter Ackroyd
Image
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
Image
Freud was just a novelist.
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
I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
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