Greg Iles Quotations

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Some things we must pass over in silence.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

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.

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

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.