Top 167 Quotes & Sayings by Ruth Rendell - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

I'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage.

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

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.

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

The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.

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.

Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.

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.

I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.

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.

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

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 don't want to be a fusty old lady writer.

I am neurotic, but I live with it. I think most people are, anyway.

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.

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

Reading taught me how to write.

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.

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.

I never write about a place I don't know.

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.

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