Quotes from Ruth Rendell

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

I get a lot of letters from people. They say "I want to be a writer. What should I do?" I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.

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

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.

Why do we have to have violence, torture, brutality in crime dramas every time we turn on television? Any new crime drama is going to have, sooner or later, a lot of torture and nasty things that make people flinch. Lots of young people I know shrink and flinch from that kind of thing on television, so I think showing it is a mistake.

I don't like the way young people write and talk about the old. I don't like their attitude, which, if they weren't young and therefore bright and vibrant, would be called outdated.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens. So I can do that.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.

I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.

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.

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

My mother had multiple sclerosis.

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.

How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?

I have a soft spot for charities that help children.

I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them.

I am neurotic, but I live with it. I think most people are, anyway.

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.

There are only two periods in a woman's life when she hopes to be taken for older than she is, under sixteen and over ninety.

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

I never carry a notebook while walking around London. I just pick those things up. I'm very good at quizzes.