Literary Birthday – 8 April – Greg Iles

Greg Iles was born on 8 April 1960 and died on 15 August 2025.

Greg Iles Quotes

1. Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up. (Turning Angel)
2. 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. (A-Z Quotes)
3. See Spot run!’ is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was. (A-Z Quotes)
4. 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. (A-Z Quotes)
5. All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That’s what I’m interested in. (BrainyQuote)
6. Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel. (BrainyQuote)
7. I’ll read anything that’s good. I have no artificial barriers based on genre. (BrainyQuote)

Greg Iles was an American novelist. He published 18 novels and one novella, spanning a variety of genres. Iles wrote his first novel in 1993, a thriller about Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess, which became the first of 17 New York Times bestsellers. Primarily set in the Deep South, his later novels have been made into films, translated into more than 20 languages, and published in more than 35 countries worldwide. Iles was a member of the legendary lit-rock group ‘The Rock Bottom Remainders‘. He contributed to Hard Listening with The Rock Bottom Remainders in 2013. His final novel was Southern Man, a political thriller.

Source for image: Greg Iles, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar