Words matter. These are the best Greg Iles Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.
Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.
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.
A large percentage of my father’s patients were African-American.
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.
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 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.
I happen to think Martin Cruz Smith is very good.
‘See Spot run!’ is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.
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.
Some things we must pass over in silence.
The South is the home of ‘an eye for an eye.’ ‘Turning the other cheek’? The South can’t see that.
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.
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.
Penn Cage I think of as annoyingly righteous sometimes. He’s almost too good.
Writing novels is sitting in a room by yourself for a year.
The thing about a small town is that there are people who just remember me as a musician, as a high school football player.
The South is just a dark place, man.
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.
In Mississippi, black and white live cheek by jowl, day in and day out.
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 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.
