Greg Iles

“I happen to think Martin Cruz Smith is very good.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We do not just belong to this universe, we are it.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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