Health, money. That’s what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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 Cockney accent. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of ‘the history play.’ There can be no doubt that Shakespeare’s presentations of ‘Henry V’ and ‘Richard III’ have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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 nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote