Greg Iles

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I am just like everyone else.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I don’t really understand the world anymore. But maybe there’s some faint hope that the good people on both sides can come together.”

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

“The South is just a dark place, man.”

“...yet he [Levon] somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other.”

“Music is instant gratification in its purest form.”

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

“Some things we must pass over in silence.”

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

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