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.

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

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 think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

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

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 think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I - I love being told by people that they enjoy my books, and I think that's really very nice.

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

I always know what I'm going to write before I sit down.

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.

I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.

I always write about what interests me.

I am curious about people. I want to know their secrets... because I am the last person to whom I would tell a secret; people tell me their secrets.

I am interested in names and what they say; it is true. I like to look at the columns of baby names in the newspapers. But I don't run out of new ones for my characters.

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

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

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 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 do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility.

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 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 don't care for people who are given peerages who have paid for them. I think it happens, and I don't like that.

I don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons.

I don't do pride. It seems to me to be a very unpleasant thing.

I don't exorcise anything with my writing. I'm sure people do, but I don't.

I don't expect the sun to be always shining, or even want that to happen.

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

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

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.

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.

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

I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.

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 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.

I don't mind being distracted.

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 don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

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.