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" I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next. "

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

" I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it. "

" The knives of jealousy are honed on details. "

" I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether. "

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

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

" 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 feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories. "

" 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. "

" People do sometimes ask me some really idiotic questions: 'Is your husband afraid of you putting arsenic in his food?' I replied that I have never written a book about poison, ever. "

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

" Why do we have to have violence, torture, brutality in crime dramas every time we turn on television? Any new crime drama is going to have, sooner or later, a lot of torture and nasty things that make people flinch. Lots of young people I know shrink and flinch from that kind of thing on television, so I think showing it is a mistake. "

" I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian. I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point. And socialist, well yes, of course, it's not a fashionable word, but I am very much of the Left. "

" I don't expect the sun to be always shining, or even want that to happen. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Reading taught me how to write. "

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

" 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 don't like the way young people write and talk about the old. I don't like their attitude, which, if they weren't young and therefore bright and vibrant, would be called outdated. "

" 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 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 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 don't do pride. It seems to me to be a very unpleasant thing. "

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

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