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" I am interested in names and what they say; it is true. I like to look at the columns of baby names in the newspapers. But I don't run out of new ones for my characters. "

Ruth Rendell

Look

I Am

Baby

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" I have never been a foodie and am seldom very hungry. "

Ruth Rendell

Seldom

Been

" 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. "

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

Ruth Rendell

Character

Who

" I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian. "

Ruth Rendell

Bad

Very

" I never write about a place I don't know. "

" Old women especially are invisible. I have been to parties where no one knows who I am, so I am ignored until I introduce myself to someone picked at random. Immediately, word gets round, and I am surrounded by people who tell me they are my biggest fans. "

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

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

" Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives. "

Ruth Rendell

Live

Fear

" I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid. "

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

" I don't know what I would do if I didn't write. "

" My mother had multiple sclerosis. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Ruth Rendell

God

Goodbye

" I don't care for people who are given peerages who have paid for them. I think it happens, and I don't like that. "

" People tell me the most extraordinary things. I've noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won't be shocked. Or judgmental. "

" Many people have a profession or a job - most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that's what I did. "

" 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. "

" My mother was a Swede who grew up in Denmark. When I go there, I visit the street where she grew up and look at her house, which is still there, and the snowberry bush, from which she ate some berries and had to have her stomach pumped. "

" 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. "

Ruth Rendell

Book

Searching

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Ruth Rendell

Crime

Tired

" I was a child, and in 1942, I was evacuated to the Cotswolds with my mother, who was a teacher - she went with her school. I lived in one house in the village, and my mother was in the vicarage. "

" Everybody wants their fame. They long for it, and I think they don't much care how they get it - to attract attention to themselves. "

" The knives of jealousy are honed on details. "