Top 50 Denise Mina Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Denise Mina

2. “A man who thinks he has a higher purpose can do terrible things, even to those he professes to love.”

— Denise Mina

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

— Denise Mina

4. “If you’ve ever had to run you know that stuff is just stuff. Even rich people can only stand in one room at a time.”

— Denise Mina

5. “Journalism is a Darwinian process.”

— Denise Mina

6. “Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.”

— Denise Mina

7. “People are interested in crime fiction when they’re quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.”

— Denise Mina

8. “I’m terrified to get married. I’m not getting married till my gay friends can.”

— Denise Mina

9. “There’s a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels.”

— Denise Mina

10. “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!”

— Denise Mina

11. “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 – they’re just working class because they speak with accents.”

— Denise Mina

12. “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.”

— Denise Mina

13. “He was an officious prick with a Freddie Mercury moustache and the social skills of a horny lapdog.”

— Denise Mina

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

— Denise Mina

15. “Ah, the meek. Playing the long game. Sneaky bastards.”

— Denise Mina

16. “It’s primal, the need to tell. It’s not about the listener but the storyteller. In some cultures, not telling your story is regarded as a sign of mental illness.”

— Denise Mina

17. “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.”

— Denise Mina

18. “In my heart Im just a lucky waitress.”

— Denise Mina

19. “There’s always these giant baffling books, like ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ People say it’s not as well written as ‘Midnight’s Children.’ Why aren’t people reading ‘Midnight’s Children?’ Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they’re great.”

— Denise Mina

20. “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.”

— Denise Mina

21. “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.”

— Denise Mina

22. “Julia saw the awe on my face. She recognised it. She pouted and graced me with a small, wry smile, then dropped her eyes and turned away as if to say, yes, here I am. I am a peerless pearl who has fallen from her setting. I have rolled into the dust under a couch and been forgotten. But, if you can see past the dust and the gloom, you will see that I am still a pearl.”

— Denise Mina

23. “Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that’s stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?”

— Denise Mina

24. “Usually when I’m trying to establish character, I try and find out where they live.”

— Denise Mina

25. “None of us know what is going to sell or what people want to read.”

— Denise Mina

26. “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.”

— Denise Mina

27. “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.”

— Denise Mina

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

— Denise Mina

29. “I often said the wrong thing–wake up, shut up, grow up. These are the wrong things to say when people are sad about some minor cruelty or sentimental incident.”

— Denise Mina

30. “If Morrow worked with herself she’d try and sit a few desks away.”

— Denise Mina

31. “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.”

— Denise Mina

32. “Just when you think something can’t get any worse someone who dislikes you comes to watch.”

— Denise Mina

33. “I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.”

— Denise Mina

34. “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.”

— Denise Mina

35. “Novelisation doesn’t imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.”

— Denise Mina

36. “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.”

— Denise Mina

37. “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.”

— Denise Mina

38. “That got a big laugh. For the rest of the journey, whenever there was a pause or the mood dipped, someone would repeat the punchline and everyone would laugh. This went on until the garrotting in the toilet.”

— Denise Mina

39. “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.”

— Denise Mina

40. “His life had no meaning. It was intolerable. The last three decades had been a hollow waste of time. Hands.”

— Denise Mina

41. “The eternal companions of all clever women are mistrust and scorn.”

— Denise Mina

42. “Lovely thing about Adam, and why I loved him, was that he was kind to me when it mattered and he had seen a lot too. It’s hard to be among vanilla bastards all the time. Normal people can get genuinely upset about a bad haircut, cross words, sick cats. It’s hard not to roll your eyes and say the wrong thing.”

— Denise Mina

43. “There is a warmth and a comfort in hearing about people in worse situations than your own. Pity is a hollow virtue. I like it. It’s a form of self-aggrandisement really, bigging yourself up by defining someone as below you. True-crime podcasts are usually great for that but sometimes you have to look really hard to find anyone down there.”

— Denise Mina

44. “The policemen had clearly been there all morning: four big white tea mugs from the canteen were drained and drip-stained, red-and-gold wrappers from caramel log biscuits were folded into interesting shapes on one side of the table, rolled up into tight little balls on the other.”

— Denise Mina

45. “I said that one of the stories in the Arabian Nights is specifically about the urge to tell a story. It’s primal, the need to tell. It’s not about the listener but the storyteller. In some cultures, not telling your story is regarded as a sign of mental illness.”

— Denise Mina

46. “I loved getting up before everyone else, when the house was still and I could read or listen to a podcast alone in a frozen world. I knew where everyone was. I knew they were safe. I could relax.”

— Denise Mina

47. “When a narrative chimes with pre-existing beliefs, it can seem so self-evidently true that all conflicting evidence is discarded.”

— Denise Mina

48. “Grief is a scar. The tissue is tough and when it’s cut again, it heals poorly.”

— Denise Mina

49. “The real meaning of stories depends on where they’re told, when and to whom.”

— Denise Mina

50. “The door to Jackson’s opens and a man staggers out. He crab-walks away from them, along the pavement until he hits a lamp post. He clings to it, waiting until his legs agree to listen to orders. Confident he has reached an entente cordiale with his knees, he straightens up, watching his rebel legs to see if the truce holds. It does, but only for standing. The moment he attempts a step he is swept around the corner like a trawlerman thrown from a deck in a storm.”

— Denise Mina