Denise Mina Quotes
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I'm terrified to get married. I'm not getting married till my gay friends can.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I grew up in London under Thatcher and that really was disgusting. A feeding frenzy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.
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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.
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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.
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I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In my heart I'm just a lucky waitress.
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To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.