Ruth Rendell Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

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

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

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

I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.

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.

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

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

we dislike those we've injured.

I can't exist without books.

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.

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

Nobody really lives in the present.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

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

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

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

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

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

They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself.

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.

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

People are different in reality from the way you've seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they're less consistent. They surprise you all the time.

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

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

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

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 always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.

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 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 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 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.'