Top 90 Ruth Rendell Quotes

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

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.

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 used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.

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.

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

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

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

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.

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’m not much of an eater.

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

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.’

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.

I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens. So I can do that.

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.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.

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

I call myself an agnostic. I’m open to change. I’m the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

Many people have a profession or a job – most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that’s what I did.

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.

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.

I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility. I think that people who make a lot of money – and I do – should certainly give a considerable amount of it away.

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

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.

I don’t choose my villains and heroes for political reasons.

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

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.

I don’t mind being distracted.

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

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.

I think I must be the only grandmother in the world who was given an iPod by her grandsons. It has changed my life – I’d be lost without it.

I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don’t think it’s good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

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.

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.

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.

It’s absolutely essential to my life. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t write.

I don’t find writing easy. That is because I do take great care; I rewrite a lot.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

My mother had multiple sclerosis.

It doesn’t matter what kind of book you write – you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

People tell me the most extraordinary things. I’ve noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won’t be shocked. Or judgmental.

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.

I have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.

I – I love being told by people that they enjoy my books, and I think that’s really very nice.

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.

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

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