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Ian Rankin
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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
#Big
#Book
#Eating
#Serious
#Sit
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
#Beginning
#Down
#Enough
#Live
#Money
You need a great idea, but then you've got to carry it through. If you get it right, you're going to be a critical success. But not everyone who works hard gets it right, or has the success they deserve: there's an element of luck.
- Ian Rankin
#Deserve
#Everyone
#Great
#Luck
#Success
I think writers have to be proactive: they've got to use new technology and social media. Yes, it's hard to get noticed by traditional publishers, but there's a great deal of opportunity out there if you've got the right story.
- Ian Rankin
#Great
#Media
#Opportunity
#Technology
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
#Friends
#Grow
#Still
#Up
#Who
When I was in my early 20s and still at uni, I won a short-story competition: £200 was the prize.
- Ian Rankin
#Competition
#Early
#Prize
#Still
#Won
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
#Administration
#Father
#Grocery
#He
#Job
People aren't coming to me looking for political essays or polemic - they're looking for a rattling good story.
- Ian Rankin
#Good
#Looking
#Me
#People
#Political
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
#Everything
#Newspaper
#Research
#Work
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
#Book
#Hell
#Matter
#New
#Nothing
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
#Bad
#I Am
#Life
#Rock Star
#Rock
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
#Caravan
#Class
#Money
#Parents
#Two
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
#Always
#Buy
#Spark
#Welsh
#Will
The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.
- Ian Rankin
#Control
#Difficult
#Enough
#Red
#Try
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
#Age
#Football
#Men
#Space
#Speech
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