Ruth Rendell
Reading taught me how to write.
I never write about a place I don't know.
I'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage.
I call myself an agnostic. I'm open to change. I'm the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins.
I don't care for people who are given peerages who have paid for them. I think it happens, and I don't like that.
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 don't like the way young people write and talk about the old. I don't like their attitude, which, if they weren't young and therefore bright and vibrant, would be called outdated.
I have never been a foodie and am seldom very hungry.
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 don't expect the sun to be always shining, or even want that to happen.
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 like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.
People tell me the most extraordinary things. I've noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won't be shocked. Or judgmental.
It's not necessary with your friends to discuss something you know you will disagree profoundly on.
People always tell me my books are so dark; I don't think they're particularly dark. I'm not like that. I'm quite a cheerful soul.
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 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.
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 was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.
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.
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 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.
Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.
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 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.
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'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years.
It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.
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.
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 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.
The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.
People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!
I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.
Where blackmail is involved, telling the police is always a good option.
The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.
I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.
I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.
Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
I wouldn't be young again even if it were possible, but I am not going to pretend that growing old is all sweetness and light.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.
My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.
I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.
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 love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.
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.
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.