Denise Mina

“Journalism is a Darwinian process.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”