Carl Hiaasen Quotes

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.

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

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.

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

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.

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

Hey. Sometimes to conclusions.

Disney world is an armpit compared to Montana.

and in the meantime don't jump to conclusions.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

...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.

Dessert was an over baked chocolate chip cookies the size of a hockey puck and just about as tasty.