None of these apparent sightings interested Hawks moor, since it was quite usual for members of the public to come forward with such accounts and to describe unreal figures who took on the adventitious shape already suggested by newspaper accounts. There were even occasions when a number of people would report sightings of the same person, as if a group of hallucinations might create their own object which then seemed to hover for a while in the streets of London. And Hawks moor knew that if he held a reconstruction of the crime by the church, yet more people would come forward with their own versions of time and event; the actual killing then became blurred and even inconsequential, a flat field against which others painted their own fantasies of murderer and victim.

— Peter Ackroyd

Now his work-mates pitied him, although they tried not to show it, and it was generally arranged that he was given jobs which allowed him to work alone. The smell of ink, and the steady rhythm of the press, then induced in him a kind of peace - it was the peace he felt when he arrived early, at a time when he might be the only one to see the morning light as it filtered through the works or to hear the sound of his footsteps echoing through the old stone building. At such moments he was forgetful of himself and thus of others until he heard their voices, raised in argument or in greeting, and he would shrink into himself again. At other times he would stand slightly to one side and try to laugh at their jokes, but when they talked about sex he became uneasy and fell silent for it seemed to him to be a fearful thing. He still remembered how the girls in the schoolyard used to chant, Kiss me, kiss me if you can will put you in my pan, Kiss me, kiss me as you said will fry you till you're dead And when he thought of sex, it was as of a process which could tear him limb from limb. He knew from his childhood reading that, if he ran into the forest, there would be a creature lying in wait for him.

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to the next; eventually he had become a vagrant, sleeping in the streets of the city where once he had walked in hope. Hawks moor left the cinema in a mood of profound, terrified apprehension and, from that time, he was filled with a sense of time passing and with the fear that he might be left discarded on its banks. The fear had not left him, although now he could no longer remember from where it came: he looked back on his earlier life without curiosity, since it seemed to lack intrinsic interest, and when he looked forward he saw the same steady attainment of goals without any joy in their attainment. For him, the state of happiness was simply the state of not suffering and, if he cared for anything, it was for oblivion.

— Peter Ackroyd

She went downstairs slowly and sat in front of the fire, rocking herself to and fro as she imagined all the harm he might have suffered: she could see him enticed into a car by a stranger, she could see him knocked down by a truck in the road, she could see him falling into the Thames and being carried away by the tide. It was her instinctive belief, however, that if she dwelled upon such scenes in sufficient detail she could prevent them from occurring: anxiety was, for her, a form of prayer. And then she spoke his name aloud, as if she were able to conjure him into existence.

— Peter Ackroyd

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

— Peter Ackroyd

Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.

— Peter Ackroyd

So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the rating and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Prensa are the vapors which rise from the lower Faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here, and I whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps. I was last night about to enter the Shadow of Rest when a Watch-man, half-drunken, thumps at the Door with his Past Three-a-clock and his Rainy Wet Morning. And when at length I slip'd into Sleep I had no sooner forgot my present Distemper than I was plunged into a worse: I dream my self to be lying in a small place underground, like unto a Grave, and my Body was all broken while others sung. And there was a Face that did so terrific me that I had like to have expired in my Dream. Well, I will say no more.

— Peter Ackroyd

So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world, interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.

— Peter Ackroyd

The embrace of present and pastime, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historian Ecclesiastical Gents Anglo rum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

— Peter Ackroyd