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

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" The knives of jealousy are honed on details. "

" Some women say as they get older they're no longer noticed: they disappear. Men, for instance, don't see them. Nobody wants them. That doesn't happen to me because of who I am. Not because I'm any more scintillating company, but because I'm Ruth Rendell. "

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

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

" As soon as I know it's about technological things or spies, I lose interest. I want to know what goes on in people's minds. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Haemophilia itself is bad enough. It is disabling day by day, even if far less incapacitating than in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the added burden of life-threatening further illnesses from contaminated NHS blood is far worse. "

" 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. "

" 'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Wexford started off as a very conventional, tough cop and not a very original character because I had no idea I was writing a series, of course. I had no idea I'd created a series character. "

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

" 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 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.' "

" I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader. "

" 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 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. "

" I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 have a soft spot for charities that help children. "

" I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility. I think that people who make a lot of money - and I do - should certainly give a considerable amount of it away. "