Top 30 Denise Mina Quotes

I have had quite a few obsessive fans. They write to me and then they turn up at signings and look really sheepish. If I said ‘boo’ to them, they would run away. I think they maybe believe I could take over their lives and sort them out. If they saw the state of my kitchen they wouldn’t think that.

The book I made it big with in the U.S. was my fourth book, ‘Sanctum.’ My novels sell really well both there and in Canada, so once a year I do a promotional tour, visiting a different city every two days, doing book readings and signings.

I’m always represented as a bit of a class warrior – a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I’m actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.

People are very frightened in publishing at the moment. Nobody knows what sells. More so now because the market’s changing so fundamentally because of Kindle and electronic publishing. It’s a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the world.

I’d read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy – I thought there must be another approach.

I’m not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It’s very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn’t always work that way.

We don’t really go in for big family dinners, but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It’s a cultural thing, so maybe we don’t need to have them to clear the air. Also, traditional family food isn’t as nice here so there’s no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles.

The idea of suicide is of a very set narrative, as if killing yourself is a definitive statement. But it can be just as meaningless as throwing a stone in a river.

I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn’t laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw.

I love bleak things.

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents’ families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person’s intellect. It becomes your default position.

I came from this very traditional background and I benefited hugely from feminism. I felt privileged going to university and doing a PhD. Most people of my background don’t get to do that.

It’s all chaos and the house is occasionally filthy but I get to stand at the school gates. Writers are so lucky to have that flexibility.

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

You have to take your ego out of it and say, do I want people to be obsequious to me or do I want to write good books? If it’s the latter, you have to take criticism. It’s annoying, but that’s how to do good stuff; listen to other people.

I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.

My family were great story-tellers. My mum was one of 12 and they were all fighting to tell stories. You have to tell a good tale or no one is going to listen. You have to make it entertaining and interesting. That’s how I learned to tell stories.

Journalism is a Darwinian process.

I have two children. They are more fun than anything in the world, and it’s more immediate fun than the hard slog of writing.

There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.

None of us know what is going to sell or what people want to read.

Even if people do wrong, we’re social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn’t help anyone.

In the ‘Garnethill’ trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O’Donnell’s dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they’re middle-class – they’re just working class because they speak with accents.

There’s always these giant baffling books, like ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ People say it’s not as well written as ‘Midnight’s Children.’ Why aren’t people reading ‘Midnight’s Children?’ Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they’re great.

I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

Novelisation doesn’t imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.

I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn’t realise political writing could be so funny.

Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that’s stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?

People are interested in crime fiction when they’re quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.