Quotes from Ruth Rendell

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.

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.

'The Da Vinci Code' was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.

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.

It is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world.

Jonathan Kellerman

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.

Hugh Grant will always be associated with his scandal, and so will Max Mosley.

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

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.

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

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

Many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from the real, true, and perfect thing.

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

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

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

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

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care; I rewrite a lot.

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

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 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.

People are still being put into geriatric wards when they don't need it. They need treatment, not just being put into bed and fed.

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