Greg Iles Quotes

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport.

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?" If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?" Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

It is easy to criticize an author, but difficult to appreciate him.

She’d majored in English, hoping that meant she could spend the next four years reading and writing. And maybe the next four years after that.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

That complete statement which is literature.

I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

It is doubtful whether mankind are most indebted to those who like Bacon and Butler dig the gold from the mine of literature, or to those who, like Paley, purify it, stamp it, fix its real value, and give it currency and utility

Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?