Denise Mina Quotes

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 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 Author

Denise Mina is a Scottish writer active since 1996. Her debut novel Garnethill (1998 Transworld) was a bestseller and won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Award for best debut. It was followed by Exile and Resolution, completing a trilogy of novels featuring Maureen O’Donnell, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
Described as ‘crime writing royalty’ by Val McDermid, she was a key figure in the rise of Tartan Noir. Conviction (2019) was a Reese's Book Club Pick.
Her latest novel, The Good Liar (2025) examines forensic junk science and the implications for justice.
She is best known for her crime novels and short stories. Her non-fiction novel, The Long Drop, was about serial killer Peter Manuel's trial in Glasgow 1958. She also writes graphic novels, wrote ‘Hellblazer’ for a year, is a playwright and regularly presents television and radio.

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 unwilling...

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 fo...

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 unwillingn...

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.

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.

In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - th...

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...

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.