Best 32 quotes of Ruth Rendell on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

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.

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

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.

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.

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.

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.

She didn't really know London, only lived in it.