Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" I'm not much of an eater. "

" 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 didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write. "

" I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't. "

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

" 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 was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom. "

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

" 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 makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

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

" 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 am neurotic, but I live with it. I think most people are, anyway. "

" 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. "

" Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens. So I can do that. "

" Reading taught me how to write. "

" I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave. "

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

" 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 get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books. "

" 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. "

" In 'The Blood Doctor,' I wrote about the history of haemophilia and the devastating effects of the disease at a time when there was no remedy. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "