Top 48 Quotes & Sayings by Greg Iles

I deal with the human psychology and evil. They are my twin issues.

Penn Cage I think of as annoyingly righteous sometimes. He's almost too good.

Southern Gothic is alive and well. It's not just a genre, it is a way of life.

I was lucky enough to be raised by a man of great integrity and rectitude. That said, he was also human and had his secret sins, as we all do.

The South is just a dark place, man.

Like my best friend, I asked for drums for Christmas, and got them. But when he moved on to guitar, I realized two things: (1) guitar is a much more expressive instrument, (2) way more girls pay attention to guitar players than to drummers.

It was quite a blow to have my perfect image of my father shattered, but that's something we all face before we come to full adulthood.

The South is the home of 'an eye for an eye.' 'Turning the other cheek'? The South can't see that.

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

A large percentage of my father's patients were African-American.

Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world.

I didn't set out to write. It was just something I always could do. Teachers would say, 'you really have this gift,' but I just didn't care.

And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out.

I happen to think Martin Cruz Smith is very good.

It's too easy to unconsciously echo another novelist's voice while reading fiction, a habit of mimicry I probably picked up as a musician.

Music is instant gratification in its purest form.

A tourist will just walk up to a Natchezian on the street and ask, 'Where does Greg Iles live?' And they'll say, 'Oh, right over there; just go knock on the door.' I've had people just walk into my office, walk into my house like it's a museum just open to the public.

America is a transplanted place. Families split and people travel 1,000 miles for a job, but the South is not yet like that. People live for three or four generations in the same town, even the same house.

Some things we must pass over in silence.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

I've learned as much about writing from songwriters as I have from other writers.

Writing novels is sitting in a room by yourself for a year.

I am just like everyone else.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

The thing about a small town is that there are people who just remember me as a musician, as a high school football player.

All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.

In Mississippi, black and white live cheek by jowl, day in and day out.

A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.

Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.

'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.

I'll read anything that's good. I have no artificial barriers based on genre.

I pull out on the highway, and a truck hit my driver's door going 70 miles an hour. Took off my right leg from the knee down; broke 20 something bones.

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.

Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach.

He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog's brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire.

...the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.

I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.

See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.

Her touch was as knowing and confident as her eyes, and as she focused all her attention upon me, I remembered that there is nothing so thrilling as a woman of words when she decides that the time for words is past.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.

A lot of my books have been that way. My World War II thriller about Sarin gas [Black Cross] was published two months before the Sarin attack in the Japanese subway. There are very weird coincidences out there. And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write, because of my fear someone will carry it out.

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.

Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.