Quotes from Denise Mina

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.

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.

I'm terrified to get married. I'm not getting married till my gay friends can.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

Journalism is a Darwinian process.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

In the forensic science course I took at university they used photographs of dead bodies. For ballistics they showed us a guy lying on the floor, and his head had burst.

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.

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.

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

If Morrow worked with herself she'd try and sit a few desks away.

January is the despairing heart of the Scottish winter