Denise Mina Quotes & Sayings

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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

He stopped at an intersection, panting, rubbing at the twinge in his hamstrings, looking around, though he knew no cars were coming in either direction.
Dropping forward at the waist Martin admitted that he was fucking himself up. Dr Leonowsky told him: hurting yourself is an articulation of self-disgust. It helps no one, prevents nothing. This wasn't a glorious loss of control, he was fooling himself, it was self-harm. — Denise Mina

January is the despairing heart of the Scottish winter — Denise Mina

When I first came here copyboys wouldn't have been allowed to eat in the canteen with journalists." A smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. "I was a copyboy once, at the Lanarkshire Gazette. Can ye believe that?"

He left a space for her to respond, so she did.

"Can I believe that a man as important as you was ever a copyboy or that Lanarkshire has its own gazette? — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

The policemen had clearly been there all morning: four big white tea mugs from the canteen were drained and drip-stained, red-and-gold wrappers from caramel log biscuits were folded into interesting shapes on one side of the table, rolled up into tight little balls on the other. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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! — Denise Mina

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? — Denise Mina

I want to kick Grandma in the penis, — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

I love bleak things. — Denise Mina

She walked through the underpass at the Elephant and Castle, enjoying the sense that nothing really mattered, not the truth about the past, nor whether they believed her, not Winnie's drinking or Vik's ultimatum. It was the perfect place to escape from a painful past. She could waste years at home trying to make sense of a random series of events. There was no meaning, no lessons to be learned, no moral - none of it meant anything. She could spend her entire life trying to weave meaning into it, like compulsive gamblers and their secret schema. Nothing mattered, really, because an anonymous city is the moral equivalent of a darkened room. She understood why Ann had come here and stayed here and died here. It wouldn't be hard. All she had to do was let go of home. She would phone Leslie and Liam sometimes, say she was fine, fine, let the calls get farther apart, make up a life for herself and they'd finally forget. — Denise Mina

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

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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

Don't go on holiday to Blackpool, it's fucking horrible there. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

Bout a month ago. She came in Boxing Day but I put her out. She was begging people, not even tapping, but begging for drink."
"She can't have been disrupting ye, surely?" asked Maureen.
"See those old swines over there?" He gestured to his only customers. The old men heard him and their chat fell silent.
The barman raised his voice. "They were asking what they would get for their money. Auld swines, playing on the lassie's weakness for the drink." He lowered his voice. "That's pensioners for ye - they can smell a bargain a mile off," he muttered, as if the bargain-hunting skill of the elderly was an unspoken universal truth. — 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. — Denise Mina

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

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

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

His life had no meaning. It was intolerable. The last three decades had been a hollow waste of time. Hands — Denise Mina

Ah, the meek. Playing the long game. Sneaky bastards. — Denise Mina

She knew that everything he did was wrong and the fault was hers. He pulled his notebook out of his pocket, stupidly. — Denise Mina

Lamont, like the judge?"
He tipped his head in embarrassment and looked away quickly. She smiled kindly at him. The two great sources of shame: privilege and penury. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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

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

The book I made it big with in the U.S. was my fourth book, 'Sanctum.' My novels sell really well both there and in Canada, so once a year I do a promotional tour, visiting a different city every two days, doing book readings and signings. — Denise Mina

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

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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

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. — Denise Mina

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

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

It was Lord of the Flies without table manners. — Denise Mina

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

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

I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn't laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

Journalism is a Darwinian process. — Denise Mina

My family were great story-tellers. My mum was one of 12 and they were all fighting to tell stories. You have to tell a good tale or no one is going to listen. You have to make it entertaining and interesting. That's how I learned to tell stories. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

In my heart I'm just a lucky waitress. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina

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

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. — Denise Mina

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. — Denise Mina