Ruth Rendell Quotes

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

It's hard to write an Evan Hunter novel because I really am starting from scratch. I'm assuming a new voice each time. The McBain voice is set.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

I am George Cockcroft. But when I come to England or Europe, where the name Luke Rhinehart is better known, then I use that name.

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Lee Child and George R. R. Martin write wildly different books. Their writing, plotting and styles have little or nothing in common. But they all write books and characters that readers find appealing.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.

I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.

A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.

I am a novelist through and through.