Old women especially are invisible. I have been to parties where no one knows who I am, so I am ignored until I introduce myself to someone picked at random. Immediately, word gets round, and I am surrounded by people who tell me they are my biggest fans.
Some women say as they get older they're no longer noticed: they disappear. Men, for instance, don't see them. Nobody wants them. That doesn't happen to me because of who I am. Not because I'm any more scintillating company, but because I'm Ruth Rendell.
Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief.
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.
Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights.
I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.
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.