People tell me the most extraordinary things. I’ve noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won’t be shocked. Or judgmental. – Ruth Rendell
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. – Ruth Rendell
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. – Ruth Rendell
I don’t think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real! – Ruth Rendell
I used to get an awful lot of letters, and they have almost all gone. I used to answer nearly all of them. – Ruth Rendell
Some women lose their husbands, and their worlds change because their financial circumstances change. All I have in common with them is a grief. – Ruth Rendell
I don’t know that I am fascinated with crime. I’m fascinated with people and their characters and their obsessions and what they do. And these things lead to crime, but I’m much more fascinated in their minds. – Ruth Rendell
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. – Ruth Rendell
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. – Ruth Rendell
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. – Ruth Rendell
I think that people who make a lot of money – and I do – should certainly give a considerable amount of it away. – 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
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. – Ruth Rendell
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. – Ruth Rendell
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. – Ruth Rendell