Quotes from Ruth Rendell

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.

My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move - he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling - was terrible.

'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.

Many people have a profession or a job - most people do, I should think. And they do it. And that's what I did.

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.

It's not necessary with your friends to discuss something you know you will disagree profoundly on.

I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.

I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.

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.

Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.

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.

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.

Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.

He would have to get used to it, she thought. He would have to get used to her being more and more preoccupied with books.

He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a woodpecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was.

His school had been so committed to establishing equality that the staff told a pupil he or she had done well only if they could tell every other member of the class the same thing.

I can tell you, she really knows her job. So do boa constrictors, said Audrey.

Greed and envy took from a man's heart everything but—well, greed and envy.

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

vault. The four bodies, one of them half-inside a

newer here? There were no dense brambles

We should get over it.

every bit of flying dust. He began to take them down.

You're supposed to be a detective. Well, detect.