Quotes from Greg Iles

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The South is just a dark place, man.

Music is instant gratification in its purest form.

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.

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

God is all powerful. God is good. Evil exists. You can reconcile any two of those statements, but not all three.

If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand. I have resolved a simple thing: I will do those things which make me happy today, and which I can also live with ten years from now.

learned a long time ago, if you're going to wait for this world to be fair, you're going to be waiting in the grave.

The past is never dead. It's not even past; if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.

A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves.

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.

You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.

All partnerships fail in the end, just like marriages. The only life after death any human being will ever know is staying in a marriage or a partnership after it's over. And that's not life—it's living death.

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.

For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.

Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand.