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" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Love
Great
Country
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" In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time. "
Ian Rankin
Life
Our
Boring
" My father worked in a grocery store. When the grocery chain went into administration, he eventually got a job in the naval dockyard in an office preparing the charts for the boats and the submarines before they headed out. "
Ian Rankin
Office
Got
Father
" I don't want the books to become PR exercises for the police; I want to have the freedom to write about cops who cross the line: bad cops. "
Ian Rankin
Become
Want
Police
" I'm not qualified for anything. I've had lots of little jobs, like picking grapes and being a tax man. I can't imagine not writing, because I've done it since I was five or six. Maybe I'd work in academia. That's always what the plan was. "
Ian Rankin
Plan
Writing
Done
" I dunno whether it was to do with my parents - we were working-class - but it was important to me to be self-sufficient. "
Ian Rankin
Me
Self-Sufficient
Parents
" I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice. "
Ian Rankin
Advice
Writing
Creative
" Being working class, my parents thought, 'Ian's going to uni, the first in the family,' and I'd do dentistry or accountancy. I was going to do accountancy; then I got a C in Economics and thought, 'Why am I doing this?' The only thing I was interested in was books and literature. "
Ian Rankin
Family
Parents
Thought
" 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.' "
Ian Rankin
Eating
Think
Serious
" I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction. "
Ian Rankin
First
Writing
Knots
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Think
Money
Live
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Me
Like
Liberal
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Chicken
Money
School
" Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction. "
Ian Rankin
Knew
Beginning
Scottish
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Bond
Crime
Reading
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
I Am
Bad
Life
" I go to Canada at least every two years. "
Ian Rankin
Every
Years
Two
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Story
Space
Men
" Writers always think their greatest work is just ahead of them. "
Ian Rankin
Greatest
Think
Ahead
" In 1991, I won the Chandler Fulbright Prize, which came with $20,000 and the stipulation of spending six months in the U.S. "
Ian Rankin
Spending
Which
Won
" I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We're still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends. "
Ian Rankin
Games
Up
Think
" I have a strong work ethic, yet I'm incredibly lazy as well. The problem with being a writer is that everything you do can be called research. Sitting in the pub is research. Reading the newspaper can be research. "
Ian Rankin
Work
Strong
Research
" At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas. "
Ian Rankin
New
Ideas
Way
" Punk gave you a kind of chutzpah, so even trying to be a writer, I just thought, 'Well, I'm going to send poems to 'Radio Times,' short stories to the 'Observer,' just have a go. "
Ian Rankin
Short
Radio
You
" No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say. "
Ian Rankin
Nothing
Say
You
" 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? "
Ian Rankin
Want
Past
Society
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Money
Working
Parents
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Ending
Know
Way
" I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio. "
Ian Rankin
Story
Competition
Newspaper
" I grew up in a family that was working-class, which taught me to be careful with money. "
Ian Rankin
Which
Be Careful
Family
" 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. "
Ian Rankin
Arts
Without
Student