I did learn that it was the greatest thing in the world to respect yourself. Respect other people.

And one of my favorites was Eddy Arnold of course. He just had that smooth, soulful voice.

I was born in a little place called Inverness, MS.

I was never into the Bluegrass, Bill Monroe and stuff like that.

I'm from the Mississippi delta originally.

Most times we would make more money in the tip boxes - they called it - than we were getting paid.

My mom moved up between Leland and Greenville when I was just a little tot.

And I tell my audience, you know, give the real stars a round of applause. Because without them I'm nobody. So I learned so much from people like that.

So I got a chance to meet a whole bunch of those old real, real rough but gentle men. They lived hard, but they lived good - in one sense, you know. But you had a lot of fun. Didn't make much money, but you had a lot of fun.

We could play them through the week, and then the weekend we could play the black joints. I learned to be very versatile and learned to love it. So it stays with me even up to now.

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.

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

I have had quite a few obsessive fans. They write to me and then they turn up at signings and look really sheepish. If I said 'boo' to them, they would run away. I think they maybe believe I could take over their lives and sort them out. If they saw the state of my kitchen they wouldn't think that.

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.

I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted.

I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

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 anything. But I'm very crass, and I'm very confrontational, and I have a temper. I had to be hyper-vigilant in every office I worked in.

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.

I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

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.