Peter Ackroyd Quotes
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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.
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Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
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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.
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There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
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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.
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I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
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I never read in bed, only in my study.
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One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
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London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
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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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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.
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Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.
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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.
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I don't know if I have a voice of my own. I don't see me being an important person with something to say. I haven't. I've got nothing to say. My opinion is of no consequence or value.
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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.
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My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.
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None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.
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People are much more interesting than people realise.
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I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.
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All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris.
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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
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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.
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I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.
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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.
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There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transcience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal diety was fate or destiny or "wyrd."
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I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
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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 ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
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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.
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Freud was just a novelist.
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