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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

Journalism is a Darwinian process. ”

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. ”