Ruth Rendell

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

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

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

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.

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

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

I'm very fond of Tennessee Williams' plays, and when my husband and I went to New Orleans in the late 1970s, we saw 'A Street Car Named Desire.'

I write every morning. From about a quarter to nine to a quarter to one. It might be nine to one, or 8:30 to 12:30.

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.

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.

I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.

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 I don't like their attitude, which, if they weren't young and therefore bright and vibrant, would be called outdated.

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

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

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

To say that Agatha Christie__ characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

You make someone into a object of _ not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you__e hurt them, marked them, they__e even more sick and ugly, aren__ they? And they__e afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn__ very pleasant, but you did ask.___o on_ he said.__o you__e got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who__ unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that__ what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they__e dirty, sovered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they__e hateful, they__e low, they__e sub-human. That__ all they__e good for, being hit, being reduced even further.