Without thought he repeated some words which a boy had once chalked on the blackboard between lessons: ‘A lump of coal is better than nothing. Nothing is better than God. Therefore a lump of coal is better than God’. And then he traced his own name with his finger on the cracked and broken floor.

— Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd Quotes

And the smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as ‘the steam of the social soup.’

— Peter Ackroyd

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character – a living being – within each of my books.

— Peter Ackroyd

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

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

— Peter Ackroyd

I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.

— Peter Ackroyd

I never read in bed, only in my study.

— Peter Ackroyd

I don’t in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I’m not.

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

— Peter Ackroyd

Reading

Freud was just a novelist.

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.

— Peter Ackroyd

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.

— Peter Ackroyd

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

— Peter Ackroyd

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

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

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.

— Peter Ackroyd

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.

— Peter Ackroyd

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

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.

— Peter Ackroyd

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