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" I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them. "

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" Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all. "

" How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives? "

" 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. "

" Reading taught me how to write. "

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

" 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. "

" Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief. "

" Many people have a profession or a job - most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that's what I did. "

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

" 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 very much like writing about homosexual relations. I don't quite know why. Perhaps it's because I feel there's still so much to be said about them. "

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

" I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night. "

" I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real! "

" The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS. "

" Violence is very much with us, and we like to see it. I doubt if you can change that, and I'm not sure you should want to. I have occasionally been very upset by something I was writing, but it's quite rare: I keep my writing very separate from my life. "

" The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt. "

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

" 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. "

" People tell me the most extraordinary things. I've noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won't be shocked. Or judgmental. "

" I don't think the Barbara Vines are mysteries in any sense. The Barbara Vine is much more slowly paced. It is a much more in-depth, searching sort of book; it doesn't necessarily have a murder in it. "

" Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives. "

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

" 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 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 write every morning. From about a quarter to nine to a quarter to one. It might be nine to one, or 8:30 to 12:30. "

" I'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage. "

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

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

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