Quotes from Greg Iles

Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.

I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.

Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach.

The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing. Life is simple. You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren't. You are alive or you are dead. I am alive.

When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.

Her touch was as knowing and confident as her eyes, and as she focused all her attention upon me, I remembered that there is nothing so thrilling as a woman of words when she decides that the time for words is past.

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.

You know, the truth isn't hard to find, if you're willing to get your hands dirty. Truth waits just under the surface for any man brave enough to scrape a little dirt away. But most people are too afraid or too lazy to get dirty. They're afraid to ask the right questions. The hard questions.

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.

Don't keep a girl guessing too long, or she'll find the answer somewhere else.