Ruth Rendell Quotations | Page 2

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.

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

It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.

It sounds awful and sort of goody two-shoes, but I never eat between meals.

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

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

I knew quite a lot about politics before I went to Parliament.

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

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

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'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.'

I'm concerned with the lost, the lonely, the shy. I think shyness is in some ways more widespread now than formerly. I used to be shy myself. Of course, you can't be me now and remain shy, but I remember very well what it felt like.

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

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'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 a very bad Christian, but I am a Christian.

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

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.

I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.

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

I really am not affected by the tragic aspects of my books.

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.

If I do, the whole thing falls apart. It fails. The illusion is in my head.

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.

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 think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!

I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility. I think that people who make a lot of money - and I do - should certainly give a considerable amount of it away.

I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave.

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

I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.

I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.

I call myself an agnostic. I'm open to change. I'm the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins.

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 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.

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

'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.

'The Da Vinci Code' was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.

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

I can't exist without books.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

they say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself ...

Nobody really lives in the present.

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.

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.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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