Denise Mina Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

In my heart Im just a lucky waitress.

I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.

There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels.

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.

Journalism is a Darwinian process.

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

Usually when I'm trying to establish character, I try and find out where they live.

If you went for a job interview in a Glasgow law firm, they used to ask you what school you went to. And that was a way of finding out what religion you were.

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

Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

A man who thinks he has a higher purpose can do terrible things, even to those he professes to love.

I grew up in London under Thatcher and that really was disgusting. A feeding frenzy.

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.