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

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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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'm terrified to get married. I'm not getting married till my gay friends can. "

Getting Married

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids. "

" I grew up in London under Thatcher and that really was disgusting. A feeding frenzy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The book I made it big with in the U.S. was my fourth book, 'Sanctum.' My novels sell really well both there and in Canada, so once a year I do a promotional tour, visiting a different city every two days, doing book readings and signings. "

" 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. "

" I love bleak things. "

" Journalism is a Darwinian process. "