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" 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. "

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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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that. "

" 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. "

" I love bleak things. "

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

" 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. "

" In my heart I'm just a lucky waitress. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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'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. "

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

" 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! "

" 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. "