Ian Rankin

“And little girls went to charm schools. Now you've all got degrees from the University of Sarcasm.”

“The great thing about America is I always come back with more books and more tip-offs of who to read. It's a country in love with crime fiction.”

“I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.”

“I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?”

“My parents were working class and didn't have much money, so holidays tended to be two weeks in a caravan at St. Andrews or a B&B in Blackpool.”

“I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I'd think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, 'No - it took you one year to write, and nine years to sit around eating Kit Kats.'”

“I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.”

“When I'm writing, I won't know whodunnit until maybe two thirds of the way through. Until then, I know as little as my detective. I just make it up as I go along. It's nerve-wracking, actually. You'll be half through and not know your conclusion. You worry one of these days the ending won't come. I'll be left with only two-thirds of a novel.”

“Why does any novelist keep writing long after they've made money? Because they've failed to write the perfect novel.”

“I don't hang out with cops.”

“I would have loved to have been a rock n' roll star. But none of us was musical, and none of us had any instruments.”

“I wanted to be able to support myself without begging for handouts from the state. All of the writers I knew when I was a student were all getting grants from the Scottish Arts Council.”

“My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.”

“At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas.”

“Writers always think their greatest work is just ahead of them.”

“I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience.”

“I am, of course, a frustrated rock star - I'd much rather be a rock star than a writer. Or own a record shop. Still, it's not a bad life, is it? You just sit at a computer and make stuff up.”

“My mother worked in a school canteen - then worked in the canteen of a chicken factory. Every Friday, the pay packet money would be allocated to cover bills.”

“I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books.”

“I'm not Rebus. We're not the same. I don't even think he'd like me if we met. He'd think I was a wishy-washy liberal.”