Top 100 Ruth Rendell Quotes
#1. They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself ...
Ruth Rendell
#2. Don't hate anyone," she had said. "It's quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.
Ruth Rendell
#3. Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.
Ruth Rendell
#4. It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.
Ruth Rendell
#5. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#6. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#7. To say that Agatha Christie's characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
Ruth Rendell
#8. I have never been a foodie and am seldom very hungry.
Ruth Rendell
#9. I'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage.
Ruth Rendell
#10. I always know what I'm going to write before I sit down.
Ruth Rendell
#11. What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.
Ruth Rendell
#13. I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
Ruth Rendell
#14. It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.
Ruth Rendell
#15. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#16. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#17. I've never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to.
Ruth Rendell
#18. I've never really been satisfied with a book. I always want it to be better.
Ruth Rendell
#19. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.
Ruth Rendell
#20. It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.
Ruth Rendell
#21. Burden thought irrelevantly that Wendy Williams must be attracted by bald men, first Rodney with his exaggerated forehead, naked as an apple, then this pebble-head.
Ruth Rendell
#22. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#23. I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
Ruth Rendell
#24. The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
Ruth Rendell
#25. I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.
Ruth Rendell
#26. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#27. We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.
Ruth Rendell
#28. I'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years.
Ruth Rendell
#29. I - I love being told by people that they enjoy my books, and I think that's really very nice.
Ruth Rendell
#30. The English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon.
Ruth Rendell
#31. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#32. People who have had a stroke and are recovering from it love being read to ... especially by someone who is a good reader - it does help them to get better.
Ruth Rendell
#33. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#34. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#35. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#36. Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
Ruth Rendell
#37. I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.
Ruth Rendell
#39. Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.
Ruth Rendell
#40. The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.
Ruth Rendell
#41. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#42. I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.
Ruth Rendell
#43. The trouble with psychology is that it doesn't take human nature into account.
Ruth Rendell
#44. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#45. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#46. Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.
Ruth Rendell
#47. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#49. People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!
Ruth Rendell
#50. I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.
Ruth Rendell
#51. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#52. People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.
Ruth Rendell
#53. I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.
Ruth Rendell
#54. I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.
Ruth Rendell
#55. '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.
Ruth Rendell
#56. The sensations he had were shared by many of the young, poor and beautiful: how unfair it was that they should be denied benefits which the old and ugly enjoyed.
Ruth Rendell
#57. I have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.
Ruth Rendell
#59. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#60. I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...
Ruth Rendell
#61. The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.
Ruth Rendell
#62. The worst has happened ... it's rather liberating.
Ruth Rendell
#63. I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'
Ruth Rendell
#64. They remained the same and could be an endless source of pleasure and satisfaction. There might be people, or a person, of whom that was also true, but he had never, by the age of eighteen, come across any of them.
Ruth Rendell
#65. Where blackmail is involved, telling the police is always a good option.
Ruth Rendell
#66. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#67. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#68. People are different in reality from the way you've seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they're less consistent. They surprise you all the time.
Ruth Rendell
#69. I don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons.
Ruth Rendell
#70. I didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write.
Ruth Rendell
#71. I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.
Ruth Rendell
#72. I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.
Ruth Rendell
#73. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#74. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#75. I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.
Ruth Rendell
#76. I knew quite a lot about politics before I went to Parliament.
Ruth Rendell
#77. Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.
Ruth Rendell
#78. We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can't get anywhere near as complex as a real person.
Ruth Rendell
#79. I'm very fond of Tennessee Williams' plays, and when my husband and I went to New Orleans in the late 1970s, we saw 'A Street Car Named Desire.'
Ruth Rendell
#80. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.
Ruth Rendell
#81. I don't do pride. It seems to me to be a very unpleasant thing.
Ruth Rendell
#82. I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.
Ruth Rendell
#83. Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.
Ruth Rendell
#84. I don't exorcise anything with my writing. I'm sure people do, but I don't.
Ruth Rendell
#85. The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.
Ruth Rendell
#86. She didn't really know London, only lived in it.
Ruth Rendell
#88. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#89. I have a soft spot for charities that help children.
Ruth Rendell
#90. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#91. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#92. I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!
Ruth Rendell
#93. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#94. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#95. I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care; I rewrite a lot.
Ruth Rendell
#96. He would have to get used to it, she thought. He would have to get used to her being more and more preoccupied with books.
Ruth Rendell
#97. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#98. 'The Da Vinci Code' was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.
Ruth Rendell
#99. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#100. 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.
Ruth Rendell
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