Ruth Rendell Quotes

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Ruth Rendell

Profession : Writer

Birth : February 17, 1930

I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.

Ruth Rendell

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

Ruth Rendell

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

Ruth Rendell

My mother had multiple sclerosis.

Ruth Rendell

Where blackmail is involved, telling the police is always a good option.

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

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

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

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

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.

Ruth Rendell

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

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

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.

Ruth Rendell

I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.

Ruth Rendell