Ian Rankin Quotes

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Ian Rankin

Profession : Writer

Birth : April 28, 1960

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

I go to Canada at least every two years.

Ian Rankin

Why does any novelist keep writing long after they've made money? Because they've failed to write the perfect novel.

Ian Rankin

Writers always think their greatest work is just ahead of them.

Ian Rankin

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

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

Ian Rankin

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

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

At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas.

Ian Rankin

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

I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books.

Ian Rankin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

Ian Rankin

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

I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.

Ian Rankin