There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
I don't exorcise anything with my writing. I'm sure people do, but I don't.
People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!
It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.
What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.
I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.
You don't knock television, even if you don't always like what they make of your work. It makes all the difference between being an also-ran writer and very famous.
I went into a church and simply said, 'Goodbye.' It is the terrible unfairness of life. How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives? That is the question which finishes it for me.
I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.
How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?
Many people have a profession or a job - most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that's what I did.
I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.
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've never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to.
I always know what I'm going to write before I sit down.
It sounds awful and sort of goody two-shoes, but I never eat between meals.
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 don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care; I rewrite a lot.
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 really am not affected by the tragic aspects of my books.
Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.
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've never really been satisfied with a book. I always want it to be better.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.
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 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.
Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief.
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 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.
Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
