Denise Mina Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“I love bleak things.”