Ruth Rendell Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

I do empathise with people who are driven by dreadful impulses. I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden. I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.

Ruth Rendell
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.

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

Ruth Rendell
I think if you're a woman, you are naturally a feminist. Unless you're hiding something.

Ruth Rendell
Nobody in their senses is going to call me a first-class writer. I don't mind because I do the very best that I can and thousands, millions of people enjoy my books.

Ruth Rendell
Stanley never answered a doorbell naturally and innocently as other people do. He always debated whether it was wise to answer it at all.

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

Ruth Rendell
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.

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

Ruth Rendell
It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.

Ruth Rendell
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Ruth Rendell
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?

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

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

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

Ruth Rendell
She opened the door to them carefully, grudgingly, as if expecting to see gypsies or a brush salesman from a disreputable firm.

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

Ruth Rendell
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.

Ruth Rendell
I could hardly have reached my age and not suffered terrible unhappiness, distress and breakdown. We all go through it, unless we are extremely dull or insensitive. I didn't have the sort of breakdown that caused one to be hospitalised, but perhaps today it would.

Ruth Rendell
The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.

Ruth Rendell
Mark wasn't interested in others and their affairs. His favourite word was 'I,' with 'me' a close second.

Ruth Rendell
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.

Ruth Rendell
Who wouldn't want to write like P. G. Wodehouse? To be so light and blithe would be wonderful. But unfortunately, it's not how things are, or what I'm like.

Ruth Rendell
And some things that apply to women don't apply to me. 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.

Ruth Rendell
In general Wexford disliked the clergy. To him the dog collar was like a slipped halo, indicating a false saintliness, probably hypocrisy and massive self-regard. As he saw it vicars were not vicarious enough. Most of them expected you to worship God in them.

Ruth Rendell
If she didn't soon have a book in her hands, if she couldn't soon read a book, she'd die.

Ruth Rendell
I think about death every day. What it would be like, and why it would happen to me. I think we ought to think about it. I suppose that what I really think is that it would be humiliating to be afraid of it.

Ruth Rendell
They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself...

Ruth Rendell
Americans... are a nation of salesmen just as the English are a nation of small shopkeepers.

Ruth Rendell
If life has taught me anything it's that 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.

Ruth Rendell