Quotes from Ruth Rendell

Don't hate anyone," she had said. "It's quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.

She wasn't there. He wouldn't have had to look too closely. She stood out from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer.

She didn't really know London, only lived in it.

People are different in reality from the way you've seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they're less consistent. They surprise you all the time.

You couldn't love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?

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

The sensations he had were shared by many of the young, poor and beautiful: how unfair it was that they should be denied benefits which the old and ugly enjoyed.

People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.

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

The admonitions of those who seldom remonstrate are more effective than the commands of naggers.

I kill, therefore I am.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one Ã¢â'¬Â¦

They remained the same and could be an endless source of pleasure and satisfaction. There might be people, or a person, of whom that was also true, but he had never, by the age of eighteen, come across any of them.

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

They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.

Goodness, Mr. Cellini, I've not time to answer all these questions. I've got to get on.' With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She must have read thousands of books, she was always at it.

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

Burden thought irrelevantly that Wendy Williams must be attracted by bald men, first Rodney with his exaggerated forehead, naked as an apple, then this pebble-head.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

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.

We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can't get anywhere near as complex as a real person.

It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.

I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair.