Peter Ackroyd Quotes

A film about my life? But I am not dead.

Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.

My name is Daniel, and this is the first volume of my life story, which, hopefully, will be a very long and distinguished one. Who should you read it? Very good question. Maybe because this is your planet, and you have a right to know what's actually happening on it.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

Everybody has their own story; everybody has their own journey.

When all's said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it.

The further you go in life, the more you realize what you're going to leave this Earth.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

I will see this game of life out to its bitter end.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

As a society, when you have your mortality slapped in your face, it changes you.

You can never predict what the specific shape of your life is going to be, and you won't really know its general shape until, God willing, you're advanced in years and you have the time and opportunity to look back in a coherent way and see what your life was about.

There are lots of scary things about getting older, but one of the biggest, I guess, is death itself. Especially in midlife, when we suddenly wake up to the fact we may have fewer years left than we have already lived.

What's more interesting than the arc of lives?

Every person is a book, each year a chapter.

There may be no single thing that can teach us more about life than death.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

At the end of your days, you will be judged by your gallop, not by your stumble.

They'll probably start working on my movie sometime... They are doing a complete movie of my life story. It will not be based on any negativity. It will be more about my life, from a kid, how I came up and why I came through.

Don't lie - when you are 105 years of age - on your deathbed, thinking, 'I should have done a few things!' I would like to think I tried as much as I could.

Death is the final wake-up call.

You know, let a few years go by until I hit my midlife crisis. Then that can be documented on film.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

I can look back on my life, where there have been moments where things might have gone the other way. Everything is like stepping stones, and I've seen people I admire falter. We're all vulnerable.