I've never really been satisfied with a book. I always want it to be better.

I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.

I don't know that I am fascinated with crime. I'm fascinated with people and their characters and their obsessions and what they do. And these things lead to crime, but I'm much more fascinated in their minds.

I don't think the Barbara Vines are mysteries in any sense. The Barbara Vine is much more slowly paced. It is a much more in-depth, searching sort of book; it doesn't necessarily have a murder in it.

I am neurotic, but I live with it. I think most people are, anyway.

Some women say as they get older they're no longer noticed: they disappear. Men, for instance, don't see them. Nobody wants them. That doesn't happen to me because of who I am. Not because I'm any more scintillating company, but because I'm Ruth Rendell.

I went into a church and simply said, 'Goodbye.' It is the terrible unfairness of life. How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives? That is the question which finishes it for me.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.

I have a Kindle, but I don't like it very much. I like a book.

I'm a very rigorous person. I like to take exercise. People get mired in old age, they get bent and twisted, but I can stop that.

I have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.

I think I must be the only grandmother in the world who was given an iPod by her grandsons. It has changed my life - I'd be lost without it.

How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?

I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!

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 think it says something that I have never had an obscene letter. A young man once attempted one, but it was so totally illiterate and hopeless that it made me laugh.

I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.

I enjoy moving. I like to be in a new place. Settling down doesn't appeal to me much. I like the whole business of it. And I love the first night in the new place.

I don't mind being distracted. I don't want to sit there in utter silence and type. If the phone rings, I usually answer it, speak for a few minutes and return to writing, or go for a walk in and out of the rooms. I don't mind a break.

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.

I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.

It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.

Where blackmail is involved, telling the police is always a good option.

I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.

I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

I'm very fond of Tennessee Williams' plays, and when my husband and I went to New Orleans in the late 1970s, we saw 'A Street Car Named Desire.'

People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

'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.

Haemophilia itself is bad enough. It is disabling day by day, even if far less incapacitating than in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the added burden of life-threatening further illnesses from contaminated NHS blood is far worse.

I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.

It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

I'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years.

The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.

I can't sum up my books. They're all rather complicated. Sometimes I think they're too complicated. But that's the way I am. When I start to write a book, my head gets full of all kinds of detail.

Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.

I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

Hugh Grant will always be associated with his scandal, and so will Max Mosley.

The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.

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 like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.

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.

It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.