Ian Rankin

I go to Canada at least every two years.

I dunno whether it was to do with my parents - we were working-class - but it was important to me to be self-sufficient.

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.

I don't hang out with cops.

I grew up in a family that was working-class, which taught me to be careful with money.

My mother worked in a school canteen - then worked in the canteen of a chicken factory. Every Friday, the pay packet money would be allocated to cover bills.

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.

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.

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.

When I was in my early 20s and still at uni, I won a short-story competition: £200 was the prize.

In 1991, I won the Chandler Fulbright Prize, which came with $20,000 and the stipulation of spending six months in the U.S.

I wanted to be able to support myself without begging for handouts from the state. All of the writers I knew when I was a student were all getting grants from the Scottish Arts Council.

'Jekyll and Hyde' I read in high school. I was expecting a Hollywood-type horror story and couldn't believe it when I got this very complex narrative from all these different points of view.

I would have loved to have been a rock n' roll star. But none of us was musical, and none of us had any instruments.

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

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

I'm not Rebus. We're not the same. I don't even think he'd like me if we met. He'd think I was a wishy-washy liberal.

The great thing about America is I always come back with more books and more tip-offs of who to read. It's a country in love with crime fiction.

People aren't coming to me looking for political essays or polemic - they're looking for a rattling good story.

Punk gave you a kind of chutzpah, so even trying to be a writer, I just thought, 'Well, I'm going to send poems to 'Radio Times,' short stories to the 'Observer,' just have a go.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'