Ruth Rendell quotes:

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.'

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.

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.

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.

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

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

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

I've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 was a child, and in 1942, I was evacuated to the Cotswolds with my mother, who was a teacher - she went with her school. I lived in one house in the village, and my mother was in the vicarage.

People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!

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.

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.

I like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.

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

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

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.

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

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 have had quite a lot of prizes, but I don't think it makes any difference to the ease or difficulty to the writing process.

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

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.

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

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.

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 don't mind being distracted.

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

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

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

I do think that being a sort of celebrity and being well off does give me some responsibility.

Haemophilia itself is bad enough. It is disabling day by day, even if far less incapacitating than in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the added burden of life-threatening further illnesses from contaminated NHS blood is far worse.

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.

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 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.

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

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.

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

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

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.

Reading taught me how to write.

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

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

the English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon.

Many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from the real, true, and perfect thing.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

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.

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

London underground took me on a tour of all the hidden places, the disused shafts and staircases... that was very interesting.

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.

Old women especially are invisible. I have been to parties where no one knows who I am, so I am ignored until I introduce myself to someone picked at random. Immediately, word gets round, and I am surrounded by people who tell me they are my biggest fans.

My mother was a Swede who grew up in Denmark. When I go there, I visit the street where she grew up and look at her house, which is still there, and the snowberry bush, from which she ate some berries and had to have her stomach pumped.

I don't think the Barbara Vines are mysteries in any sense. The Barbara Vine is much more slowly paced. It is a much more in-depth, searching sort of book; it doesn't necessarily have a murder in it.

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

My mother had multiple sclerosis.

My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.

The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.

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

I get up just before six and come downstairs, put food out for the cats, and open the cat flap. Then I work out for 35 or 40 minutes - I have a very large bathroom with an elliptical cross-trainer and a bicycle.

People are still being put into geriatric wards when they don't need it. They need treatment, not just being put into bed and fed.

I don't make any notes, but I do know where to find things. Suppose I need to know where Wexford first talked about his love of the countryside or where he quotes Larkin or what was the beginning of his hatred of racism or where he first encountered domestic violence; I would be able to find it straight away.

I wouldn't be young again even if it were possible, but I am not going to pretend that growing old is all sweetness and light.

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.

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.

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.

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 I must be the only grandmother in the world who was given an iPod by her grandsons. It has changed my life - I'd be lost without it.

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'm careful about keeping myself fit and thin, or as thin as I can manage.

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

I am interested in names and what they say; it is true. I like to look at the columns of baby names in the newspapers. But I don't run out of new ones for my characters.

I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!

Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief.

I don't want to be a fusty old lady writer.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

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

I can't exist without books.

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.

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

It is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world.

It's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.

Nobody really lives in the present.

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

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

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

The worst has happened ... it's rather liberating.

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.

there must be a routine to life, a framework to hang life on. Routines were what kept you sane, gave you something to do at this moment and at that, definite places to go, positive things to do. Abandon it and that way madness lies.

they say you cannot make a noise to annoy yourself ...

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

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

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

we dislike those we've injured.

We don't say a man's ill if he's crazy about sex, if he can't get enough sex. Why should a woman be different?

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

When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and the secrets of your heart, as well as possessions.