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

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.

- Ruth Rendell

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

- Ruth Rendell

As soon as I know it's about technological things or spies, I lose interest. I want to know what goes on in people's minds.

- Ruth Rendell

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

- Ruth Rendell

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

- Ruth Rendell

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

- 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

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.

- Ruth Rendell

I very much like writing about homosexual relations. I don't quite know why. Perhaps it's because I feel there's still so much to be said about them.

- Ruth Rendell

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.

- Ruth Rendell

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

- 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

Reading taught me how to write.

- Ruth Rendell

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

- 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

Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights.

- Ruth Rendell

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

- Ruth Rendell

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

- 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