Top 100 Ruth Rendell Quotes
#1. I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.
Ruth Rendell
#2. They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself ...
Ruth Rendell
#3. 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
#4. I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.
Ruth Rendell
#5. 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
#6. I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility.
Ruth Rendell
#7. To be a classic, a novel should be original.
Ruth Rendell
#8. London underground took me on a tour of all the hidden places, the disused shafts and staircases ... that was very interesting.
Ruth Rendell
#9. Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.
Ruth Rendell
#10. It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.
Ruth Rendell
#11. Greed and envy took from a man's heart everything but - well, greed and envy.
Ruth Rendell
#12. 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
#13. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.
Donna Leon
#14. 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
#15. To say that Agatha Christie's characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
Ruth Rendell
#16. I have never been a foodie and am seldom very hungry.
Ruth Rendell
#17. I'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage.
Ruth Rendell
#18. 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
#19. I don't expect the sun to be always shining, or even want that to happen.
Ruth Rendell
#20. I always know what I'm going to write before I sit down.
Ruth Rendell
#21. What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.
Ruth Rendell
#23. It is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world.
Ruth Rendell
#24. 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
#25. I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
Ruth Rendell
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. I've never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to.
Ruth Rendell
#31. I've never really been satisfied with a book. I always want it to be better.
Ruth Rendell
#32. 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
#33. It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.
Ruth Rendell
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
Ruth Rendell
#38. Ten thousand years of civilization shed in an instant when you put a woman behind the wheel of a car.
Ruth Rendell
#39. The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
Ruth Rendell
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?
Ruth Rendell
#43. We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.
Ruth Rendell
#44. 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
#45. The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
Ruth Rendell
#46. I - I love being told by people that they enjoy my books, and I think that's really very nice.
Ruth Rendell
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.
Ruth Rendell
#56. There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
Ruth Rendell
#57. 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
#58. Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
Ruth Rendell
#59. I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.
Ruth Rendell
#61. Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.
Ruth Rendell
#62. The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.
Ruth Rendell
#63. I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.
Ruth Rendell
#64. I like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.
Ruth Rendell
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#72. 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
#73. I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.
Ruth Rendell
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The trouble with psychology is that it doesn't take human nature into account.
Ruth Rendell
#77. 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
#78. We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.
Ruth Rendell
#79. It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.
Ruth Rendell
#80. 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
#81. I have a Kindle, but I don't like it very much. I like a book.
Ruth Rendell
#82. 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
#83. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#84. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#85. They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.
Ruth Rendell
#86. His school had been so committed to establishing equality that the staff told a pupil he or she had done well only if they could tell every other member of the class the same thing.
Ruth Rendell
#87. People do sometimes ask me some really idiotic questions: 'Is your husband afraid of you putting arsenic in his food?' I replied that I have never written a book about poison, ever.
Ruth Rendell
#88. It sounds awful and sort of goody two-shoes, but I never eat between meals.
Ruth Rendell
#89. 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?
Ruth Rendell
#90. Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.
Ruth Rendell
#91. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#92. 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
#93. I don't want to be a fusty old lady writer.
Ruth Rendell
#95. People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!
Ruth Rendell
#96. I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.
Ruth Rendell
#97. Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Ruth Rendell
#98. 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.
Ruth Rendell
#99. 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
#100. People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.
Ruth Rendell
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top