Ruth Rendell

“There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.”

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

“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 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.”

“The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.”

“I really am not affected by the tragic aspects of my books.”

“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.”

“My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.”

“I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.”

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

“I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.”

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

“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.”

“I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.”

“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 think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.”

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

“I don't want to be a fusty old lady writer.”

“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.'”

“I'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage.”