Denise Mina Quotes

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

Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids.

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

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.

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

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.

Journalism is a Darwinian process.

I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted.

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.

I always wanted to work at Take A Break magazine, you know, just to inject a little bit of politics into their stories. I applied for a job there after I'd done my law degree and didn't even get an interview. I only wrote Garnethill because I didn't get that job!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.