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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Carl Hiaasen Quotes

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

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

– 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

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

– Carl Hiaasen

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

– 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 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.

– 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

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.

– Carl Hiaasen

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

– Carl Hiaasen

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

– Carl Hiaasen

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.

– Carl Hiaasen

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

– 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

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.

– Carl Hiaasen

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

– Carl Hiaasen

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.

– Carl Hiaasen

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

– 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

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

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

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

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

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

– Carl Hiaasen

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.

– Carl Hiaasen

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

– Carl Hiaasen