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" 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. "

Ruth Rendell

Speak

Writing

Mind

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" 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 try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do. "

" The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better. "

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

" 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'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 don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons. "

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

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

Ruth Rendell

Bad

Very

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" You don't knock television, even if you don't always like what they make of your work. It makes all the difference between being an also-ran writer and very famous. "

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

Ruth Rendell

Book

Kindle

" 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 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. "

" People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that! "

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

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

" It's not necessary with your friends to discuss something you know you will disagree profoundly on. "

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

" Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading. "

" 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 mind being distracted. "

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

" 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 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. "