I'm not much of an eater.
— Ruth Rendell
We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can't get anywhere near as complex as a real person.
How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?
I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian.
'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.
Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights.
'The Da Vinci Code' was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.
The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.
People do sometimes ask me some really idiotic questions: 'Is your husband afraid of you putting arsenic in his food?' I replied that I have never written a book about poison, ever.
My mother had multiple sclerosis.
It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.
I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.
The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.
I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!
What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.
I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility. I think that people who make a lot of money - and I do - should certainly give a considerable amount of it away.
I very much like writing about homosexual relations. I don't quite know why. Perhaps it's because I feel there's still so much to be said about them.
Hugh Grant will always be associated with his scandal, and so will Max Mosley.
Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.
Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
I really am not affected by the tragic aspects of my books.
My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move - he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling - was terrible.
Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens. So I can do that.
I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.
While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.
I have had quite a lot of prizes, but I don't think it makes any difference to the ease or difficulty to the writing process.
I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.
I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.
I'm concerned with the lost, the lonely, the shy. I think shyness is in some ways more widespread now than formerly. I used to be shy myself. Of course, you can't be me now and remain shy, but I remember very well what it felt like.
I always write about what interests me.
I think we all fear appearing foolish in public. We don't want to be laughed at.
Why do we have to have violence, torture, brutality in crime dramas every time we turn on television? Any new crime drama is going to have, sooner or later, a lot of torture and nasty things that make people flinch. Lots of young people I know shrink and flinch from that kind of thing on television, so I think showing it is a mistake.
I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one. In fact I believe that if I weren't to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn't be able to write it at all.
People who have had a stroke and are recovering from it love being read to... especially by someone who is a good reader - it does help them to get better.
People are still being put into geriatric wards when they don't need it. They need treatment, not just being put into bed and fed.
I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.
I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.
I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.
