Carl Hiaasen quotes

The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind. (Carl Hiaasen)
My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon. (Carl Hiaasen)
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
It's easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story. (Carl Hiaasen)
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
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!' View quote
Carl Hiaasen