Peter Ackroyd

If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote…

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

I don't know if I have a voice of my own. I don't see me being an important person with something to…

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

“I believe now that there can be no real sense of loss or seperation without the recognition of death; we were too…

— Peter Ackroyd

I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in…

— 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…

— Peter Ackroyd

“absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down.…

— Peter Ackroyd

“Those in their snug Bed-chambers may call the Fears of Night meer Bugbears, but their Minds have not pierced into the Horror…

— Peter Ackroyd

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?'…

— Peter Ackroyd

“dyer. (Looking at him scornfully) So that is why Wits swarm like Egypt's Frogs. If I were a Writer now, I would…

— Peter Ackroyd

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is…

— Peter Ackroyd

In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of…

— Peter Ackroyd

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive…

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

“This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a…

— Peter Ackroyd

“Time. In another time. Either before or after. They were not stars, but fires. They were the souls of birds. They were…

— Peter Ackroyd

Freud was just a novelist.

— Peter Ackroyd

“I need to know when,' he said, 'In this case when is more important than how. Do you have a time-table?' For…

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

“His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to…

— Peter Ackroyd

“And across these mean Dwellings of Black Step Lane, where as a Boy I dwell'd for a while, the Shaddowe of my…

— Peter Ackroyd

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it,…

— Peter Ackroyd