Top 167 Quotes & Sayings by Ruth Rendell - Page 3

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

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.

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.

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 didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write.

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.

I'm a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian. I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point. And socialist, well yes, of course, it's not a fashionable word, but I am very much of the Left.

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.'

People always tell me my books are so dark; I don't think they're particularly dark. I'm not like that. I'm quite a cheerful soul.

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

I'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.

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

They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself.

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

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.

To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

Ten thousand years of civilization shed in an instant when you put a woman behind the wheel of a car.

The worst has happened ... it's rather liberating.

We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.

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

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?

London underground took me on a tour of all the hidden places, the disused shafts and staircases... that was very interesting.

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

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.

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.

we dislike those we've injured.

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.

I can't exist without books.

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.

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

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

Nobody really lives in the present.

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.

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

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

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.