Ruth Rendell
The knives of jealousy are honed on details.Collection: Jealousy
I enjoy moving. I like to be in a new place. Settling down doesn't appeal to me much. I like the whole business of it. And I love the first night in the new place.Collection: Business
What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.Collection: Society
I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.
I am curious about people. I want to know their secrets... because I am the last person to whom I would tell a secret; people tell me their secrets.
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 used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.
I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.
I don't choose my villains and heroes for political reasons.
I am interested in names and what they say; it is true. I like to look at the columns of baby names in the newspapers. But I don't run out of new ones for my characters.
It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.
I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care; I rewrite a lot.
Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.
I've never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to.
Wexford started off as a very conventional, tough cop and not a very original character because I had no idea I was writing a series, of course. I had no idea I'd created a series character.
I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
Everybody wants their fame. They long for it, and I think they don't much care how they get it - to attract attention to themselves.
I - I love being told by people that they enjoy my books, and I think that's really very nice.
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 don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.
I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.
I don't exorcise anything with my writing. I'm sure people do, but I don't.
Violence is very much with us, and we like to see it. I doubt if you can change that, and I'm not sure you should want to. I have occasionally been very upset by something I was writing, but it's quite rare: I keep my writing very separate from my life.
I don't do pride. It seems to me to be a very unpleasant thing.
Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.
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.
Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.
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.
Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief.
As soon as I know it's about technological things or spies, I lose interest. I want to know what goes on in people's minds.
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 think it says something that I have never had an obscene letter. A young man once attempted one, but it was so totally illiterate and hopeless that it made me laugh.
Many people have a profession or a job - most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that's what I did.
I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.
I've never really been satisfied with a book. I always want it to be better.
I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.
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 don't make any notes, but I do know where to find things. Suppose I need to know where Wexford first talked about his love of the countryside or where he quotes Larkin or what was the beginning of his hatred of racism or where he first encountered domestic violence; I would be able to find it straight away.
I don't know that I am fascinated with crime. I'm fascinated with people and their characters and their obsessions and what they do. And these things lead to crime, but I'm much more fascinated in their minds.
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 am neurotic, but I live with it. I think most people are, anyway.
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.
I went into a church and simply said, 'Goodbye.' It is the terrible unfairness of life. How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives? That is the question which finishes it for me.
I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'
The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.
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 have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.
I have a Kindle, but I don't like it very much. I like a book.
It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.
There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.