Top 167 Quotes & Sayings by Ruth Rendell
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British writer Ruth Rendell.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.
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.
I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.
I really am not affected by the tragic aspects of my books.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.
I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.
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.
The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.
How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?
I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.
I think we all fear appearing foolish in public. We don't want to be laughed at.
What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.
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 always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.
I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.
I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.
'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.
I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian.
I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.
While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.
Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.
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 I don't like their attitude, which, if they weren't young and therefore bright and vibrant, would be called outdated.
I call myself an agnostic. I'm open to change. I'm the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins.
The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
Why do we have to have violence, torture, brutality in crime dramas every time we turn on television? Any new crime drama is going to have, sooner or later, a lot of torture and nasty things that make people flinch. Lots of young people I know shrink and flinch from that kind of thing on television, so I think showing it is a mistake.
I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.
I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.
I always know what I'm going to write before I sit down.
I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.
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.
My mother had multiple sclerosis.
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.
I don't mind being distracted.
'The Da Vinci Code' was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.
Hugh Grant will always be associated with his scandal, and so will Max Mosley.
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.
Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights.
I knew quite a lot about politics before I went to Parliament.
It sounds awful and sort of goody two-shoes, but I never eat between meals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.
I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.
I'm not much of an eater.
I always write about what interests me.
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.
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.
I have a soft spot for charities that help children.
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 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 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.
I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.
I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!
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