Peter Ackroyd Character Quotations

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

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

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.