Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think it says something that I have never had an obscene letter. A young man once attempted one, but it was so totally illiterate and hopeless that it made me laugh. "

Ruth Rendell

Young Man

Laugh

Think

Related Quotes:

" I don't care for people who are given peerages who have paid for them. I think it happens, and I don't like that. "

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

Ruth Rendell

Seem

Magic

" I don't like the way young people write and talk about the old. I don't like their attitude, which, if they weren't young and therefore bright and vibrant, would be called outdated. "

" The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS. "

" I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't. "

" The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better. "

" I have never been a foodie and am seldom very hungry. "

Ruth Rendell

Seldom

Been

" My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move - he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling - was terrible. "

" I enjoy moving. I like to be in a new place. Settling down doesn't appeal to me much. I like the whole business of it. And I love the first night in the new place. "

" I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader. "

" It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible. "

" 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. "

" My mother was a Swede who grew up in Denmark. When I go there, I visit the street where she grew up and look at her house, which is still there, and the snowberry bush, from which she ate some berries and had to have her stomach pumped. "

" If I've got to have a stroke or a heart attack, I'd rather have a heart attack. I don't think that's the only reason I campaign for the Stroke Association, but a stroke would be a terrible thing. "

" I'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years. "

" The knives of jealousy are honed on details. "

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

" I always write about what interests me. "

" I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night. "

" I am curious about people. I want to know their secrets... because I am the last person to whom I would tell a secret; people tell me their secrets. "

" Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair. "

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

" In 'The Blood Doctor,' I wrote about the history of haemophilia and the devastating effects of the disease at a time when there was no remedy. "

" It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write. "

" I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next. "

" I knew quite a lot about politics before I went to Parliament. "

" I don't expect the sun to be always shining, or even want that to happen. "