Ruth Rendell Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Ruth Rendell on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.
It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.
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.
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.
It's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.
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 think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!
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.
I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.
Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.
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.
It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.
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 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.
It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.
There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
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 makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.
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 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 don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
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.
Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.
The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.
I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.
I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.
I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.
She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to.
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.
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.
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.
People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.
Many people have a profession or a job - most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that's what I did.
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.'
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.
People tell me the most extraordinary things. I've noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won't be shocked. Or judgmental.
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.