Ruth Rendell Quotes

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

It's difficult for me to say, but I don't think the sex scenes are particularly erotic.

I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

Soap operas have become sex operas.

I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.

I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing.

If it doesn't have sex scenes in it, I won't do it.

His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.

Obviously, there are those in the industry who don't give romance novels the level of respect the sales would warrant. They'll talk about a book that sells maybe 100,000 copies, that happens to be very literary, whereas something like 'Crossfire' will sell 13 million copies in a single language and hardly get any mentions at all.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

A sex scene is gratuitous when it only exists for its own sake.

Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work.

I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.

I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.

I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.