Top 87 Ian Rankin Quotes
#1. My reaction to your news is delighted astonishment that Lanark has been judged more popular than a book by Ian Rankin, and only regret that this wonderful honour had no money attached to it!
Christopher Brookmyre
#2. Robert Rotenberg does for Toronto what Ian Rankin does for Edinburgh.
Jeffery Deaver
#3. I love thriller writers. My favourites are Harlan Coban, Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Kathy Reichs and Ed McBain.
Maeve Binchy
#4. I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.
John Gordon Sinclair
#5. Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.
Mark Billingham
#6. I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader - I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.
John Niven
#7. when the shit was heading fanwards.
Ian Rankin
#8. 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
#10. all eyes turned towards him, entered the
Ian Rankin
#11. Strip the veneer, and the world had moved only a couple of steps from the cave.
Ian Rankin
#12. He had perfected the art of looking interested, and could grasp in surprise at any and every predictable punchline.
Ian Rankin
#13. Woodwork creaks and out come the freaks, eh?
Ian Rankin
#14. 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
#15. John Rebus ~ he tried to walk through the isles (of the book shop) without focusing. If he focused he would become interested and if he became interested he would buy. He already had over fifty unread books at home, piled next to his bed
Ian Rankin
#16. muted 'thanks' as the person moved away. 'It
Ian Rankin
#17. Rebus drank his coffee and felt his head spin. He was feeling like the detective in a cheap thriller, and wished that he could turn to the last page and stop all his confusion, all the death and the madness and the spinning in his ears.
Ian Rankin
#18. POETS Day, remember! Fox smiled to himself: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday. It was all the invitation he needed.
Ian Rankin
#19. And little girls went to charm schools. Now you've all got degrees from the University of Sarcasm.
Ian Rankin
#20. I am reading Ian Rankins book Doors Open and am enjoying his dark Edinburgh narrative will rate soon once I have read it. I am also a fan of Jane Austen and have visited her Museum House in Chawton, Hampshire every year for the last three years. My Favourite book is Sense and Sensibility.
Ian Rankin
#21. Rather than hanging around like a fart under a duvet.
Ian Rankin
#22. Tell me, Francis, do you buy your one-liners wholesale? Only they're well past their sell-by.
Ian Rankin
#23. Yes, Siobhan ?" Rebus said by way of an answer.
"Page wants you inside the tent rather than out."
"Is that even possible ?"
"You'd be acting in a consultative capicity."
"Like Sherlock Holmes ? Would I need invoices & stuff ? And a housekeeper and a sidekick ?
Ian Rankin
#24. We've piled his plate high with shit," Fox conceded. "And not even tied a bib around his neck," Kaye added. "Is your afternoon grilling to be courtesy of a woman called Stoddart?
Ian Rankin
#25. It seemed to him a very Edinburgh thing. Welcoming, but not very.
Ian Rankin
#26. Rebus reminded himself to stop praying. Perhaps if he stopped praying, God would take the hint and stop being such a bastard to one of his few believers on this near-godforsaken planet.
Ian Rankin
#27. 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
#28. At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas.
Ian Rankin
#29. His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience
the experience of reading someone else's thoughts
over real life.
Ian Rankin
#30. That guy should be in porn films." Barclay frowned. "Why's that then, Allan?" Ward looked at him. "Tell me, Tam, when did you last see a bigger prick?
Ian Rankin
#31. Scotsman's way of dealing with death. He'd found
Ian Rankin
#32. There were always dog walkers out & about. Sometimes they even stopped for a chat while the various mutts inspected each other. Rebus would be asked how old his dog was.
No idea.
The breed, then ?
Mongrel.
And all the while, he would be thinking about cigarettes.
Ian Rankin
#33. My father was a slave to capitalist ideology. He didn't know what he was doing."
"You mean you went to an expensive school?
Ian Rankin
#34. But you used to know a good thing when you saw it.
Trouble is, that's never what I see when I look in the mirror.
What do you see? He looked at her.
Sometimes I don't see anything at all.
Ian Rankin
#35. Fifteen years, and all he had to show were an amount of self-pity and a busted marriage with an innocent daughter hanging between them. It was more disgusting than sad.
Ian Rankin
#36. We've already eaten,' Fox said. 'Nice, was
Ian Rankin
#37. The man nodded and brought a bottle from the glass-fronted fridge,
Ian Rankin
#38. 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
#39. A good album should be more than the sum of its parts.
Ian Rankin
#40. Down Where the Drunkards Roll." "How
Ian Rankin
#41. It was a quiet street - people kept themselves to themselves. It
Ian Rankin
#42. It was the laughter of birthdays, of money found in an old pocket.
Ian Rankin
#43. Places changing and people with them, dreams shifting ever further beyond reach.
Ian Rankin
#44. 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
#45. parked and placed the POLICE sign on the dashboard.
Ian Rankin
#46. Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.
Ian Rankin
#47. I've just worked out what the music on the speakers is," he said. "It's John Martyn, Over The Hill."
"And ?"
"And nothing. It's just, maybe I'm not there yet.
Ian Rankin
#48. I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.
Ian Rankin
#49. 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
#50. Trapped in limbo, believing in a lack of belief, but not necessarily lacking the belief to believe.
Ian Rankin
#51. Everything you do from waking till sleeping is against somebody's Bible, Cafferty.
Ian Rankin
#52. Rebus was eating breakfast in the canteen and wishing there was more caffeine in the coffee, or more coffee in the coffee come to that.
Ian Rankin
#53. I doubt he'd give me the smell from his farts - no, tell a lie: in that one respect he's being more than generous.
Ian Rankin
#54. [About a tiresome colleague]: He could bore for Scotland.
Ian Rankin
#56. He'd tried to talk to you about anarchy yesterday but his English and your French conspired against the dialog.
Ian Rankin
#57. There's an insult buried in there somewhere, but I can't quite see it.
Ian Rankin
#58. The mistrust and resentment they brought with them, the way tribes feared anything new, anything from outside the camp's tight confines.
Ian Rankin
#59. I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?
Ian Rankin
#60. 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
#61. This man had something to hide, some shame in his past, and those with a past can always be bought.
Ian Rankin
#62. Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.
Ian Rankin
#63. War created bizarre allies, while peace itself could be divisive.
Ian Rankin
#64. What happens to sanity when you chain it to a wall?
Ian Rankin
#65. Sky glowing dull pink. Simmer dim, as the Shetlanders called
Ian Rankin
#66. Was still a fine, persistent drizzle. There was a word in Scots for it - smirr.
Ian Rankin
#67. The online world could stuff that in its pipe and vape it.
Ian Rankin
#68. 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
#69. Rebus remembered that the premature withdrawal of the penis during intercourse for contraceptive reasons was often referred to as 'getting off at Haymarket.
Ian Rankin
#70. ...despite rumors to the contrary, you're on the side of the angels. (...) Whether you like it or not.
Ian Rankin
#71. 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
#72. Was it all inevitable, John?" Reeve was pushing his fingers across the floor of the cell, seated on his haunches. I was lying on the mattress.
Yes," I said. "I think it was. Certainly, it's written that way. The end of the book is there before the beginning's hardly started.
Ian Rankin
#73. He's as smooth as a fresh-laid turd and gives off the same smell.
Ian Rankin
#74. POETS day," he reminded Siobhan. "Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday," she recited.
Ian Rankin
#76. 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
#77. Groynes divided the mostly sandy beach into neat compartments.
Ian Rankin
#78. It's easier if you do a handstand,' commented Rebus. 'What is?' 'Talking out of your arse.
Ian Rankin
#80. 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
#81. partner ACC Colin Carswell based at police HQ Sir David Strathern chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police Jean Burchill Rebus's current partner, museum curator
Ian Rankin
#82. Hardship bred a bitter, quickfire humour and resilience to all but the most terminal of life's tragedies.
Ian Rankin
#83. He wondered what percentage of the world's art was actually kept in bank vaults and the like. Like unread books and unplayed music, did it matter that art went unseen?
Ian Rankin
#84. 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
#85. Also, he was more discriminating now than he had been then, back in the old days when he would read a book to its bitter end whether he liked it or not. These days, a book he disliked was unlikely to last ten pages of his concentration.
Ian Rankin
#86. You wouldn't think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we'll do it one day. That's how negligent we are.
Ian Rankin
#87. There are worse forms of prostitution than whoring.
-Inspector John Rebus
Ian Rankin
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