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49 quotes by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd, CBE, FRSL (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist, and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles...
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If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.

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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... →

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As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

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Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

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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 detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.

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I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

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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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I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.

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People are much more interesting than people realise.

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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.

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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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