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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Ruth Rendell

Racism

Love

Violence

" 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. "

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

Ruth Rendell

Bad

Very

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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'm not much of an eater. "

Ruth Rendell

Much

Eater

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Ruth Rendell

Unpleasant

Pride

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

Ruth Rendell

Seem

Magic

" 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 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. "