Ruth Rendell Quotes

As a novelist, I tend to know significantly more about my characters than I do about my friends.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

I see my responsibility as to give people something they want to keep turning the pages of and giving people something to chew on, looking at some aspect of human nature that hadn't occurred to them recently.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

I've still got my characters in my head, and I can still hear them. When I go to the grocery store, I hear them.

On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.