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" I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes. "

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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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights. "

" 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. "

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

" It sounds awful and sort of goody two-shoes, but I never eat between meals. "

" 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 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 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'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years. "

" I call myself an agnostic. I'm open to change. I'm the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins. "

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

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

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

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

" 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 knives of jealousy are honed on details. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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