Quotes from Ruth Rendell

People tell me the most extraordinary things. I've noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won't be shocked. Or judgmental.

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 don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.

I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave.

I don't do pride. It seems to me to be a very unpleasant thing.

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 love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

I don't mind being distracted. I don't want to sit there in utter silence and type. If the phone rings, I usually answer it, speak for a few minutes and return to writing, or go for a walk in and out of the rooms. I don't mind a break.

People who have had a stroke and are recovering from it love being read to... especially by someone who is a good reader - it does help them to get better.

Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.

It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't.

My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.

I have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.

I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.

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

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

I didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write.

I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.

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.

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

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.