Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death. Peter Ackroyd
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
His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr. Peter Ackroyd
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
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books. 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 detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical. Peter Ackroyd
Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens. Peter Ackroyd
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
A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous. Graham Greene
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery. Graham Greene
Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years. Graham Greene
The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Graham Greene
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution. Graham Greene