Ruth Rendell

“Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation,…

— Ruth Rendell

“I don't judge people. I don't think we should/”

— Ruth Rendell

“You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see…

— Ruth Rendell

there must be a routine to life, a framework to hang life on. Routines were what kept you sane, gave you something…

— Ruth Rendell

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

— 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

I get a lot of letters from people. They say "I want to be a writer. What should I do?" I tell…

— Ruth Rendell

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

— Ruth Rendell

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

— Ruth Rendell

When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and…

— Ruth Rendell

Many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from…

— Ruth Rendell

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

— Ruth Rendell

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

— Ruth Rendell

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

— Ruth Rendell

They say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself.

— Ruth Rendell

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.…

— Ruth Rendell

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

— Ruth Rendell

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

— Ruth Rendell

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

— Ruth Rendell

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

— Ruth Rendell

“I know someone said that even a really bad liar tells more truth than lies, but you still can't tell what are…

— Ruth Rendell

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating…

— Ruth Rendell

“You couldn’t love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more…

— Ruth Rendell

I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

— Ruth Rendell

I can't exist without books.

— Ruth Rendell