Quotes About Ruth Rendell

I can't sum up my books. They're all rather complicated. Sometimes I think they're too complicated. But that's the way I am. When I start to write a book, my head gets full of all kinds of detail.

People do sometimes ask me some really idiotic questions: 'Is your husband afraid of you putting arsenic in his food?' I replied that I have never written a book about poison, ever.

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

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

Her mind that I have never claimed to read must be a place where slimy things swim and jostle pale eyed as in some subterranean sink.

short and long whitish sticks and thinner white sticks and something like a long, curved rod with ridges all along its length.

In 'The Blood Doctor,' I wrote about the history of haemophilia and the devastating effects of the disease at a time when there was no remedy.

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

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.

'The Da Vinci Code' was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.

I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.

I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.

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.

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

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'm very fond of Tennessee Williams' plays, and when my husband and I went to New Orleans in the late 1970s, we saw 'A Street Car Named Desire.'