Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBEwas an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth17 February 1930
allow church finishes god life question sheer simply terrible
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.
cop created series
Wexford started off as a very conventional, tough cop and not a very original character because I had no idea I was writing a series, of course. I had no idea I'd created a series character.
novelists philip sex
There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
awful business deal father great guilt knew later ms multiple nobody suffer suffered
My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.
ought
It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.
appearing fear
I think we all fear appearing foolish in public. We don't want to be laughed at.
feminists unless women
I think that all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up to a point.
house lived teacher
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.
given ipod life
I think I must be the only grandmother in the world who was given an iPod by her grandsons. It has changed my life - I'd be lost without it.
morning nine
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.
people
Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.
ate berries grew stomach visit
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.
cheerful people quite
People always tell me my books are so dark; I don't think they're particularly dark. I'm not like that. I'm quite a cheerful soul.
buried finding finds flowers gardens goes gone houses indeed instead killer lived next serial sinister street trees turned victims
I think what would I do next if, as in his case, he goes to look at the place where a serial killer lived and indeed buried his victims and instead of finding this very squalid and sinister street he finds it's all gone and the whole place has been turned into a very pretty little enclave of small, pretty houses and gardens and trees and flowers and cobbled streets.