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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

we dislike those we've injured.

Nobody really lives in the present.

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?

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

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.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

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

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

They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself.

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

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

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

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