Denise Mina Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

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

“In my heart I'm just a lucky waitress.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”