Top 100 Rendell Quotes
#1. The same electorate that is unhappy with [Pennsylvania's] GOP Sen. Rick Santorum appears to have some qualms with Rendell.
Stuart Rothenberg
#2. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.
Donna Leon
#3. If I were president, I am not sure that I would offer Ed Rendell the job of chief of staff.
Ed Rendell
#4. I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.
Val McDermid
#5. I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.
Ian Rankin
#6. I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.
Mark Billingham
#7. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#8. I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.
Ruth Rendell
#9. They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself ...
Ruth Rendell
#10. We've been working our tail off and lead by that example.
Ed Rendell
#11. Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.
Ruth Rendell
#12. I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.
Ruth Rendell
#13. 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
#14. I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility.
Ruth Rendell
#15. To be a classic, a novel should be original.
Ruth Rendell
#16. Growing Greener doesn't produce money for farmland preservation or open space preservation.
Ed Rendell
#17. Creating new jobs for Pennsylvanians continues to be my highest priority throughout the Commonwealth.
Ed Rendell
#18. London underground took me on a tour of all the hidden places, the disused shafts and staircases ... that was very interesting.
Ruth Rendell
#19. There are a tremendous amount of environmental issues that are on the table.
Ed Rendell
#20. Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.
Ruth Rendell
#21. It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.
Ruth Rendell
#22. Greed and envy took from a man's heart everything but - well, greed and envy.
Ruth Rendell
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. To say that Agatha Christie's characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
Ruth Rendell
#26. I have never been a foodie and am seldom very hungry.
Ruth Rendell
#27. I'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage.
Ruth Rendell
#28. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#29. I don't expect the sun to be always shining, or even want that to happen.
Ruth Rendell
#30. I always know what I'm going to write before I sit down.
Ruth Rendell
#31. What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.
Ruth Rendell
#32. I've always sort of believed that the future takes care of itself.
Ed Rendell
#34. It is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world.
Ruth Rendell
#35. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#36. And preserving our open spaces or having them there for recreational purposes is one of the things that contributes to the high level of quality of life that we offer in Pennsylvania, and that also translates into economic benefits.
Ed Rendell
#37. I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
Ruth Rendell
#38. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. One of the things that people don't realize is that that natural beauty, those recreational forests, they have an economic development impact for the state as well.
Ed Rendell
#43. And the beautiful open spaces, the forests of Pennsylvania, the recreational uses that come from having these green open spaces and forests, they contribute dramatically to the level of our tourism, dramatically.
Ed Rendell
#44. I've never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to.
Ruth Rendell
#45. I've never really been satisfied with a book. I always want it to be better.
Ruth Rendell
#46. We will not lose this election for lack of money.
Ed Rendell
#47. The fires of night
through distance dance
ghosts who still know how to sing
Tamara Rendell
#48. It used to be that Democrats and Republicans would disagree, but they could be social to each other. There were times during the year that we acted together in the good of the country.
Ed Rendell
#49. 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
#50. Would I be happy just practicing law? No. Would I be happy just doing TV and speeches? No. I want to do all of these things and be as active as I can ... but my main goal is to have some degree of influence on the public discussion.
Ed Rendell
#51. I normally don't endorse in Democratic primaries.
Ed Rendell
#52. It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.
Ruth Rendell
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. My mother was a Swede who grew up in Denmark. When I go there, I visit the street where she grew up and look at her house, which is still there, and the snowberry bush, from which she ate some berries and had to have her stomach pumped.
Ruth Rendell
#57. I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
Ruth Rendell
#58. Ten thousand years of civilization shed in an instant when you put a woman behind the wheel of a car.
Ruth Rendell
#59. The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
Ruth Rendell
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?
Ruth Rendell
#63. Demon," the woman spat onto the road. "Well, girl, thank you. I grant no one's wishes and so you mark me 'demon.' I grant no wishes and I do as I see fit to be done. I will not answer to you, girl, nor to any one of yours, but I will always look. I am not the one who turns away.
Tamara Rendell
#64. I think politics today is all about false choices: You can have a robust energy economy and a challenged environment, or a great environment and no economy. That's a false choice. You can do both.
Ed Rendell
#65. We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.
Ruth Rendell
#66. 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
#67. The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
Ruth Rendell
#68. I - I love being told by people that they enjoy my books, and I think that's really very nice.
Ruth Rendell
#69. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I have said consistently both in my papers and in my speeches - which you heard in the primary campaign - that I will continue to phase out the Capital Stock and Franchise tax.
Ed Rendell
#75. 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
#76. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#77. 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
#78. But in the long run we're not going to be able to keep out of state trash away from Pennsylvania.
Ed Rendell
#79. I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.
Ruth Rendell
#80. There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
Ruth Rendell
#81. 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
#82. Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
Ruth Rendell
#83. I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.
Ruth Rendell
#84. We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
#86. Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.
Ruth Rendell
#87. I don't think anyone can calculate the effect of having a Jew on the ticket.
Ed Rendell
#88. The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.
Ruth Rendell
#89. I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.
Ruth Rendell
#90. I like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.
Ruth Rendell
#91. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#92. 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
#93. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#94. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#95. Here," he said, "I place the man I was aside the man I am now. And we have not the same hope nor thought, yet are one continuous breath from the body of I, Akiyama Akio.
Tamara Rendell
#96. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#99. I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.
Ruth Rendell
#100. I call myself an agnostic. I'm open to change. I'm the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins.
Ruth Rendell
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