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. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character – a living being – within each of my books. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
Thomas More rarely discussed his siblings, and two of them are never mentioned by him. It is likely that they were part of that infant mortality which had provoked such concern for early baptism. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I’m like that old Peggy Lee song, ‘Is That All There Is?’ I want to believe there’s something else going on, but what that something else is I don’t pretend to know. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
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. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
I don’t believe necessarily the past is in the past. It’s eternal, it’s all around us. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote
Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I’m writing them. For instance, when I was writing ‘Doctor Dee,’ I believed in magic. And when I wrote ‘Hawksmoor’ I believed in psychic geography. But as soon as I type the last full stop, I’m back to being a complete blank again. Peter Ackroyd Read Quote