Ruth Rendell Quotes & Sayings

It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

Nobody really lives in the present. — Ruth Rendell

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

I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

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

I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility. — Ruth Rendell

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. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

I don't mind being distracted. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move - he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling - was terrible. — Ruth Rendell

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. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

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

I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

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

It is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

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

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

To be a classic, a novel should be original. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

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

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

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?' — Ruth Rendell

Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights. — Ruth Rendell

I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist. — Ruth Rendell

I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught. — Ruth Rendell

Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible. — Ruth Rendell

I don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons. — Ruth Rendell

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. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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. — Ruth Rendell

The knives of jealousy are honed on details. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

You don't knock television, even if you don't always like what they make of your work. It makes all the difference between being an also-ran writer and very famous. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have had quite a lot of prizes, but I don't think it makes any difference to the ease or difficulty to the writing process. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

The trouble with psychology is that it doesn't take human nature into account. — Ruth Rendell

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

I - I love being told by people that they enjoy my books, and I think that's really very nice. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

I don't judge people. I don't think we should/ — Ruth Rendell

I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real! — Ruth Rendell

I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure. — Ruth Rendell

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

He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a woodpecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

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? — Ruth Rendell

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

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

I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion. — Ruth Rendell

The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine. — Ruth Rendell

I don't exorcise anything with my writing. I'm sure people do, but I don't. — Ruth Rendell

Many people have a profession or a job - most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that's what I did. — Ruth Rendell

'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

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

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

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

I think that people who make a lot of money - and I do - should certainly give a considerable amount of it away. — Ruth Rendell

I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money. — Ruth Rendell

I've done the big 12-city tours, and I'm never going to do that again - never. I was younger then. It wears you out, you know. — Ruth Rendell

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

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

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

It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace. — Ruth Rendell

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