Carl Hiaasen Book Quotations

Everybody's idea of a great book is different, of course. For me it's one that makes my jaw drop on every page, the writing is so original.

I thought nobody in his right mind was going to publish a book for kids by me -- not if they've read my adult fiction,

I think once they get into it and read it, they'll plug right in to it, ... It's not fiction. It's the real thing. The message and underlying theme are serious. There are parts of this book that are downright disturbing.

It's actually not very hard to re-set between the adult novels and the ones for younger readers. The narrative voices are very similar, the smartass attitude, the environmental battles. Kids love books that are irreverent and challenge authority, when authority is arbitrary, greedy or foolish. They also love it when you make fun of grownups, and I've spent my whole life as a writer doing that.

The Thieves of Manhattan is a sly and cutting riff on the book-publishing world that is quite funny unless you happen to be an author, in which case the novel will make you consider a more sensible profession-like being a rodeo clown, for example, or a crab-fisherman in the Bering Sea.

Y'see, I get so bored so easily. I like to start with a clean slate each time. Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story,

I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books, because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket, then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering.

My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.

I’m waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh’s pharmacist writes a book.

As frightening as this may sound, what you see in the books is the way I see the world. And so far I haven't seen anything, either in Florida or elsewhere, to dissuade me from it.

I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid,