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.
Ruth RendellI try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel sorry for my psychopaths, because I do.
Ruth RendellWhile 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 RendellIt's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.
Ruth RendellThere 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.
Ruth RendellIt is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world.
Ruth RendellWhen 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.
Ruth RendellTen thousand years of civilization shed in an instant when you put a woman behind the wheel of a car.
Ruth RendellI 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.
Ruth RendellWe 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?
Ruth RendellI've had two proposals since I've been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.
Ruth RendellTo say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
Ruth RendellWe always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.
Ruth Rendellthe 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.
Ruth Rendell