Quotes by Greg Iles

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."