Peter Ackroyd Quotes

67 quotes in 1088 categories

• Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.
• I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my…
• I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
• I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher,…
• Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating…
• The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
• Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.
• Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
• It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?
• London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement…
• 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…
• 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.…
• What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we…
• And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies,…
• I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.
• Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.
• As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.
• Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
• Freud was just a novelist.
• I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

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