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.
Ruth Rendell
It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.
The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.
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 have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.
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.
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.
Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.
I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.
I have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.
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.
I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.
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.
I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.
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.'
Where blackmail is involved, telling the police is always a good option.
People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!
'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.
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 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 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.
People always tell me my books are so dark; I don't think they're particularly dark. I'm not like that. I'm quite a cheerful soul.
I don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons.
The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.
It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.
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.
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.
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.
My mother had multiple sclerosis.
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.
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.
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.
Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief.
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.
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.
I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.
As soon as I know it's about technological things or spies, I lose interest. I want to know what goes on in people's minds.
I get up just before six and come downstairs, put food out for the cats, and open the cat flap. Then I work out for 35 or 40 minutes - I have a very large bathroom with an elliptical cross-trainer and a bicycle.
I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't.
I think that people who make a lot of money - and I do - should certainly give a considerable amount of it away.
