Carl Hiaasen Quotations

My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.

When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the other hand that.' You're getting paid for your opinion.

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines.

I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something.

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there's just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.

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.

Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.

My humour has always come from anger, but I have to make sure I don't just get angry and jump on a soapbox.

The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

My driving record is not exemplary, but I have never had a speeding ticket over 100 m.p.h. I can say that unequivocally.

I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.

Disney's something to be a little alarmed about. It's not just a little theme park anymore. It's now an ethic and outlook and strategy that goes way beyond central Florida.

From my experience, politicians are much more uncomfortable being made fun of than they are being preached at and screeched at - you know, and the soapbox routine. They're much more uneasy knowing they're a target of ridicule.

There's so much hate that we direct externally that we forget we have our own psychos. But that's the role of the satirist - you have to examine your own country and say, look!

Informed opponents of Obama's healthcare initiative have expressed dismay at the low level of discourse.

There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.

I don't have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.

They have a crystalline sense of right and wrong; it disappears when they walk out the door with their M.B.A.

Unfortunately, I don't get to read nearly as much as I want because I'm always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.

When you put on the suits, when you pretend you're honest and you're robbing at a far higher level, these guys deserve to... well, to be in my novels, and I have special fates reserved for them.

Kids feel so strongly about what's going on today and what's happening to the world, and that's very inspiring. I feel more hopeful than ever before about the future.

Humor can be an incredible lacerating and effective weapon. And that is the way I use it.

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.

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.

When I'm deciding to read a book, I never open to the first chapter, because that's been revised and worked over 88 times. I'll just turn to the middle of the book, to the middle of a chapter, and just read a random page and I'll know right away whether this is the real deal or not.

Welcome to the exciting world of hurricane journalism! While your highly paid colleagues on the anchor desk are broadcasting from the dry safety of a heavily fortified television studio, you and your camera crew will be out in the maw of the storm, risking your lives for no good reason.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.

No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add.

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.

Sunset on the water ought to be a quiet and easy time, but I guess some people can't stand a little silence.

That's the thing about being a Labrador retriever - you were born for fun. Seldom was your loopy, freewheeling mind cluttered by contemplation, and never at all by somber worry; every day was a romp. What else could there possibly be to life? Eating was a thrill. Pissing was a treat. Shitting was a joy. And licking your own balls? Bliss. And everywhere you went were gullible humans who patted and hugged and fussed over you.

I still do a weekly opinion column for the Miami Herald, and it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Rotten fish.

The one word that no politician will ever speak, is 'enough.' Enough.

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.

A bonus, being a writer, is that the true-life source material is fabulously bizarre. There's so much corruption, violence and free-floating depravity that the well never runs dry, whether you're a novelist, a journalist, or both.

Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.

Sometimes you're going to be faced with situations where the line isn't clear between what's right and what's wrong.Your heart will tell you to do one thing and your brain will tell you to do something different. In the end, all that's left is to look at both sides and go with your best judgment.

I was born and raised here [in Florida], so I still have tremendous affection for the state - especially the few wild places that haven't disappeared under concrete. What's left is still worth fighting for, and that's why I stay.

That dreadful alligator attack in Orlando would never have happened if Disney had put up real warning signs, like other Florida resorts do. But wild alligators don't fit the Disney image, so they were no proper warnings, and a child died for no reason.

Mrs. Bonneville never buckled her seat belt, even though it was required by state law; an ardent libertarian, she opposed government meddling in all matters of personal choice.

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.

Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I've read in years. The characters are marvelously unique, the setting is intoxicating and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn't want to put it down.

Disney is just Disney. It's a company that's very good at what it does - controlling and promoting an image - until something happens that it can't control or cover up.

I've always enjoyed making people laugh. But in order for me to be funny, I have to get ticked off about something.

When I was writing Razor Girl, I thought it would be fun to have a redneck TV family that was really just a bunch of actors who had to be trained to be rednecks. That's not so farfetched, if you know how Hollywood works.

Hey. Sometimes to conclusions.

There's this false notion that this is a regional phenomenon, when in fact every state in the union has hardcore rednecks. No exceptions.

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.

I won't be making any friends in the corporate suites.

I'm sort of fascinated by America's fascination with rednecks, the whole Duck Dynasty thing. Being a white guy from the South, I find it amazing that so many TV viewers are enchanted by beards, bad dentistry and moonshine accents.

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.

Obviously you have to make a profit to put out a newspaper. I'm not an idiot. But when the margins are in excess of 25 per cent you're talking about greed.

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.

I love reality shows. The folks who dream up some of these concepts are either geniuses, or totally stoned.

Roy remembered the time he and his father had a talk about fighting. 'It's important to stand up for what's right,' Mr. Eberhardt had said, 'but sometimes there's a fine line between courage and stupidity.

as a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. .....

...Right now there's a pair of bad cops on their way out here to shoot me." "You don't know that." "Yeah, you're right," Stranahan said. "They're probably just collecting Toys for Tots. Now go.

Jimmy Lee Baylis was a wise man, and knew better than to talk back to the man who signed his paycheck.

Garcia wondered why people with JESUS stickers on their bumper always drove twenty miles per hour under the speed limit. If God was my co-pilot, he thought, I'd be doing a hundred and twenty.

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 think it's always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod's distance from the actual moviemaking.

The TV commercials, which are endless and fairly crass, gave birth to Brock, the bad-lawyer character in Razor Girl. In real life you can find even sleazier examples than him.

I've never progressed very far from my days as a smart aleck in middle school.

It's easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.

Mickey Cray had been out of work ever since a dead iguana fell from a palm tree and hit him on the head.

Unfortunately, Florida is a mecca for the shyster element, and there are apparently no rules on the kinds of advertising a lawyer can do.

Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.

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

Ironically, I come from a family of lawyers - my dad, my grandfather, and now my oldest son. And some of my very best friends are lawyers, though they don't resemble the ones that appear in my novels.

I've never before had the same main character appear in consecutive novels, but I liked Yancy and his attitude, and I was curious to see what would happen to him after Bad Monkey. And I liked the idea of him still trying to get his detective job back while he's stuck on roach patrol.

That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.

Disney world is an armpit,compared to Montana!!

Every writer scrounges for inspiration in different places, and there's no shame in raiding the headlines. It's necessary, in fact, when attempting contemporary satire. Sharp-edged humor relies on topical reference points.

and in the meantime don't jump to conclusions.

The evening news made her wonder if God was dead; the morning sun made her believe He wasn't.

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.

The central part of the state is more remote and less scenic, and there's a huge agricultural belt that stretches from the south of Lake Okeechobee to the border of Everglades National Park, where the restoration effort is being concentrated, .. Obviously the movement to save the Everglades runs up against agricultural concerns.

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

We've always been fascinated with movie stars and singers, but the fascination with people who really have nothing to offer is something new.

These are all kids who are going to be growing up to vote. They have a much clearer idea of the kind of world they want to live in, ... I like to think sanity will prevail.

Fallen-tree video is absolutely essential to hurricane broadcasts. The most sought-after footage is, in order of ratings: 1. Big tree on strip mall. 2. Big tree on house. 3. Big tree on car. 4. Small tree on car. 5. Assorted shrubbery on car.

People say sometimes, gosh, that was brave of you to write such-and-such last week. 'Brave?' What do they mean 'brave?' It's right! How could you not write it?

I wait for the headlines to inspire me.

The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.

I have this pet peeve which is when I read a novel I don't want to hit page 200 and have to go back to the beginning to figure out which character is which,

It just gets kinda creepy, it's so orderly and efficient and insulated from the real world,

It's something to be a little alarmed about, ... It's not just a little theme park anymore. It's now an ethic and outlook and strategy that goes way beyond central Florida.

They have a crystalline sense of right and wrong, ... it disappears when they walk out the door with their M.B.A.

I always try to burden even the villains with some weird predilection they have to cope with. It helps make them memorable, and gives them a human side.