Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.
I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility.
I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.
I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel sorry for my psychopaths, because I do.
I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.
To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
It's not necessary with your friends to discuss something you know you will disagree profoundly on.
Ten thousand years of civilization shed in an instant when you put a woman behind the wheel of a car.
Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.
I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.
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 don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!
I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.
It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.
I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.
It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.
We don't say a man's ill if he's crazy about sex, if he can't get enough sex. Why should a woman be different?
I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.
There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
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 think that people who make a lot of money - and I do - should certainly give a considerable amount of it away.
Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.
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.
It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.
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.
Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.
Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.
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.
We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.
It's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.
There are only two periods in a woman's life when she hopes to be taken for older than she is, under sixteen and over ninety.
I have had quite a lot of prizes, but I don't think it makes any difference to the ease or difficulty to the writing process.
People tell me the most extraordinary things. I've noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won't be shocked. Or judgmental.
London underground took me on a tour of all the hidden places, the disused shafts and staircases... that was very interesting.
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 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've done the big 12-city tours, and I'm never going to do that again - never. I was younger then. It wears you out, you know.
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.
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.
The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.
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 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.
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 get a lot of letters from people. They say "I want to be a writer. What should I do?" I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.