Ruth Rendell

“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.”

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

“I don't do pride. It seems to me to be a very unpleasant thing.”

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

“I don't make any notes, but I do know where to find things. Suppose I need to know where Wexford first talked about his love of the countryside or where he quotes Larkin or what was the beginning of his hatred of racism or where he first encountered domestic violence; I would be able to find it straight away.”

“If I've got to have a stroke or a heart attack, I'd rather have a heart attack. I don't think that's the only reason I campaign for the Stroke Association, but a stroke would be a terrible thing.”

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

“I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.”

“I've done the big 12-city tours, and I'm never going to do that again - never. I was younger then. It wears you out, you know.”

“In 'The Blood Doctor,' I wrote about the history of haemophilia and the devastating effects of the disease at a time when there was no remedy.”

“I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave.”

“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 like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.”

“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.”

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

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