GREG ILES

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Some things we must pass over in silence.

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

I happen to think Martin Cruz Smith is very good.

Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.

I am just like everyone else.

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've learned as much about writing from songwriters as I have from other writers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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