London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books. -Peter Ackroyd Imagination
My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it. -Peter Ackroyd Failure
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 Imagination
It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern. -Peter Ackroyd Chance
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 Imagination
