Ruth Rendell Quotes

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

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

I think we all fear appearing foolish in public. We don't want to be laughed at.

I have a soft spot for charities that help children.

It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.

If I've got to have a stroke or a heart attack, I'd rather have a heart attack. I don't think that's the only reason I campaign for the Stroke Association, but a stroke would be a terrible thing.

I like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.

They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself ...

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.

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 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.

Wexford started off as a very conventional, tough cop and not a very original character because I had no idea I was writing a series, of course. I had no idea I'd created a series character.

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 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 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.

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 was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.

Two years after Tolkien's The Hobbit was published I read it for the first time. Twenty years later I read it again and experienced just the same feeling of delight and happiness and a quite breathless pleasure. That first time, when I was nine, was also the first time I remember feeling this. It is a sensation known to all lovers of fiction and comes at about page two, when you know it's not only going to be good, but immensely satisfying, enthralling, not to be put down without resentment, drawing inexorably to a conclusion of power and dramatic soundness.

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.

Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.

To say that Agatha Christie's characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

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.

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.

It sounds awful and sort of goody two-shoes, but I never eat between meals.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.

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 enjoy moving. I like to be in a new place. Settling down doesn't appeal to me much. I like the whole business of it. And I love the first night in the new place.

She didn't really know London, only lived in it.

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.

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 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.

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

It's not necessary with your friends to discuss something you know you will disagree profoundly on.

I think it says something that I have never had an obscene letter. A young man once attempted one, but it was so totally illiterate and hopeless that it made me laugh.

I don't want to be a fusty old lady writer.

Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd.

I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.

I don't judge people. I don't think we should/

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.

I have never been a foodie and am seldom very hungry.

Greed and envy took from a man's heart everything but - well, greed and envy.

My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.

It's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.

I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.

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.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

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.

Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.

I knew quite a lot about politics before I went to Parliament.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

I very much like writing about homosexual relations. I don't quite know why. Perhaps it's because I feel there's still so much to be said about them.

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

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

And it is true that we are warmed by being called by our names. We all know people who hardly ever do it, who only do it when they absolutely must. They manage to steer conversations along, ask questions, respond, without ever using a first name. And they chill others with their apparent detachment, those others who can never understand that it is diffidence which keeps them from committing themselves to the use of names. They might get the names wrong, or use them too often, be claiming an intimacy to which they have no right, be forward, pushy, presumptuous.

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

I was a child, and in 1942, I was evacuated to the Cotswolds with my mother, who was a teacher - she went with her school. I lived in one house in the village, and my mother was in the vicarage.

I've never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to.

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 ...

Why do we have to have violence, torture, brutality in crime dramas every time we turn on television? Any new crime drama is going to have, sooner or later, a lot of torture and nasty things that make people flinch. Lots of young people I know shrink and flinch from that kind of thing on television, so I think showing it is a mistake.

I'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years.

Where blackmail is involved, telling the police is always a good option.

I have a Kindle, but I don't like it very much. I like a book.

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

I'm concerned with the lost, the lonely, the shy. I think shyness is in some ways more widespread now than formerly. I used to be shy myself. Of course, you can't be me now and remain shy, but I remember very well what it felt like.

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.

She wasn't there. He wouldn't have had to look too closely. She stood out from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer.

I've never really been satisfied with a book. I always want it to be better.

People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!

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.

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you've hurt them, marked them, they're even more sick and ugly, aren't they? And they're afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn't very pleasant, but you did ask."
"Go on" he said.
"So you've got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who's unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that's what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they're dirty, sovered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they're hateful, they're low, they're sub-human. That's all they're good for, being hit, being reduced even further.

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

I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian.

People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.

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.

There must be a routine to life, a framework to hang life on. Routines were what kept you sane, gave you something to do at this moment and at that, definite places to go, positive things to do. Abandon it and that way madness lies.

Some women say as they get older they're no longer noticed: they disappear. Men, for instance, don't see them. Nobody wants them. That doesn't happen to me because of who I am. Not because I'm any more scintillating company, but because I'm Ruth Rendell.

Don't hate anyone," she had said. "It's quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.

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.

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

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.

The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.

We dislike those we've injured.

You couldn't love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?

The admonitions of those who seldom remonstrate are more effective than the commands of naggers.

I always write about what interests me.

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

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

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

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

Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief.

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.

Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.

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

Goodness, Mr. Cellini, I've not time to answer all these questions. I've got to get on.'
With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She must have read thousands of books, she was always at it.

When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and the secrets of your heart, as well as possessions.

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