Quotes from Peter Ackroyd

the drama upon the stage is sometimes no more than an intensification of the rituals within our own hearts.

The English seem to relish unsystematic learning of this kind, in the same manner that they embarked upon Grand Tours of Europe in pursuit of a peripatetic scholarship.

dyer. (Looking at him scornfully) So that is why Wits swarm like Egypt's Frogs. If I were a Writer now, I would wish to thicken the water of my Discourse so that it was no longer easy or familiar. I would chuse a huge lushious Style! vannbrugghe. (Interrupting) Ah the music of Erudition, it is unimaginable to weaker Wits. dyer. (Ignoring him) I would imploy outlandish Phrases and fantasti-call Terms, thus to restore Terrour, Reverence and Desire like wild Lightning.

There is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancy of dress.

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

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

He felt at peace only in the hour before dawn, when the darkness seemed to give way slowly to a mist, and it was at this hour that he would wake and sit by his window.

Those in their snug Bed-chambers may call the Fears of Night meer Bugbears, but their Minds have not pierced into the Horror of the World which others, who are adrift upon it, know.

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell? A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow's nose. Your best friend is still alive. Who is that? You. The sun is none the worse for shining on a dunghill. He must needs swim that is borne up to the chin. An hour's cold will suck out seven years of heat.

it is a dreadfull thing to look down Praecipices.

So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.

Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination.

If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean.

It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience.

But didn't you know? Everything is made up.

In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that 'queen Katherine is the true queen of England

DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.

I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page

And we recall in Dickens' fiction how universal it is that a child looks after an adult, and how the adult remains so dependent upon the child that he becomes something worse than child-like.

I believe now that there can be no real sense of loss or seperation without the recognition of death; we were too young to consider any such eventuality, and simply moved on with our lives into some indefinite but illimitable future.

Time. In another time. Either before or after. They were not stars, but fires. They were the souls of birds. They were entries into the vast fire. They were the eyes of the dead. And in the darkness they were imprisoned by them.