Greg Iles Quotes

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

Inspiration and stealing are two completely different things. If somebody wants to make a song like "Stairway to Heaven" and writes a song on acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin does not own every song that's on acoustic guitar for the rest of time.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.

I've always gone to see all kinds of shows and stole what I could, as we all do. We see an artist and hear a song and think, 'I bet I could sing that song. I'll put that in my show.'

I try to write like the writers I admire - I rip them off in form. It comes from George Strait and Merle Haggard records, and country music in general is really good at that, the twisted phrase... So I'm always looking for that angle in my own work.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.

It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

I wouldn't be as comfortable with who I am if it had not been for Prince. I mean, my label 'Wondaland' would not exist without 'Paisley Park' coming before us.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.

I think I'm influenced a lot by Drake in specific ways in my writing.

It's pretty rare that something I've written is close to something that's pre-existed.