Quotes from Denise Mina

but sometimes you have to fit into life, or waste a lot of time and energy wishing it would fit in with you.

They were all performing the same miracle: repairing the insult of their own childhoods by making it all right for her. Murray

One [belief] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators. Steven Pinker

Kay got off the bus at the Squinty Bridge and walked across the river to Broomielaw. A brisk wind streamed across the river from the broad plane of Govan, rising up the boom of the flats. Even in the deep doorway, it lifted the tail of her coat and blew her hair up over her ears. Cars passed quickly, anticipating the motorway five hundred yards away. Kay told herself that this was a mistake but she pressed the buzzer anyway.

Beautiful women like Julia have a hard hand to play, so much is projected on to them, they get bulldozed all the time. I think I wanted to say that I cared what she thought and maybe have her admire my trousers again. I think I had a little crush on her.

Even rich people can only stand in one room at a time.

Sorg är ett ärr. Vävnaden blir hård och när såret går upp igen läker det dåligt.

Leslie's leathers and dirty hair would be chic in a biker bar but in the glittery galleria she looked as seemly as a dead toenail in a pair of strappy sandals.

I've an awful druth

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.

Because I write prose, when I sat down to write a comic, it feels like my brain's working differently. It actually feels like different bits of my head are springing into action.

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

With my earlier books, I got quite bored being with one protagonist all the way through. With the Alex Morrow books, I wanted to do something a bit more holistic, so there were lots of different points of view, and I wanted to look at aspects of crime that you don't tend to look at.

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.

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.

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.

Comics don't work if the story is all in the text and the images are illustrative. It's hard to have enough faith in the artists to allow them to do their job.

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

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

It's very hard to be cut off in Glasgow because it's such a small city. You know, we have the highest rate of per-capita imprisonment, certainly in Britain, maybe in Europe. We have a very high murder rate here. So most people will know someone who's been to prison.

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'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.

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

I was very aware of office politics because I was so baffled by them. So much so goes unsaid. No one says 'you're a cheeky so-and-so,' no one says 'you're so moody,' nobody ever confronts anyone else about anything. But I'm very crass, and I'm very confrontational, and I have a temper. I had to be hyper-vigilant in every office I worked in.