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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Carl Hiaasen

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

Carl Hiaasen

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

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.

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.

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.

Carl Hiaasen

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

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.

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.

Carl Hiaasen

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Carl Hiaasen

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

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!'

Carl Hiaasen

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Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen - Image

Photo: Wes Washington, CC BY-SA 3.0

Occupation: American Writer
Born: March 12, 1953
Quotes count: 61

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