On writing under two names
Ruth and Barbara are two aspects of me. Ruth is tougher, colder, more analytical, possibly more aggressive … Barbara is more feminine … For a long time I have wanted Barbara to have a voice as well as Ruth. It would be a softer voice speaking at a slower pace, more sensitive perhaps, and more intuitive.”
– Introduction to US paperback editions of A Dark Adapted Eye and A Fatal Inversion
On reading
Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
- A Judgement in Stone (1977)
His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you’ve got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back.
On time
Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.
― A Fatal Inversion, as Barbara Vine (1987)
Our children, when young, are part of ourselves. When they grow up they are just other people.
―The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy (1998)
We are all mad at three in the morning
― Fatal Inversion (1987)
On fear
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
- Talking to Strange Men (1987)
On crime
“Violence is very much with us, and we like to see it: I doubt if you can change that, and I’m not sure you should want to. I have occasionally been very upset by something I was writing, but it’s quite rare: I keep my writing very separate from my life.
- Portrait of the Artist, the Guardian, (2003)
The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
- An Unkindness Of Ravens, 1985
The old detective story that’s got a really complicated tortuous motive doesn’t apply to mine. It’s that people do these things almost by accident, or because of anger, their rage, their madness – and then probably regret it.
On her characters
“I don’t get sick of him [Chief Inspector Wexford] because he’s me. He’s very much me. He doesn’t look like me, of course, but the way he thinks and his principles and his ideas and what he likes doing, that’s me. So I think you don’t get tired of yourself.”
- A Life in Writing, the Guardian
On marriage
Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one’s other self listening.
- A Sleeping Life, 1979
I’ve had two proposals since I’ve been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.
On life
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one …
― Shake Hands Forever, 1975
On death
I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.
