Quotes from Carl Hiaasen

The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America's values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company and not the other way around.

Shad pointed to the book on the cocktail table. 'The guy in this story, he turns into a motherfucking centipede. Wakes up one morning and bingo! He's a bug. Sounds asinine, but it sure makes you think. People change overnight, they're not careful.

dug in, but he seemed to be feeling no

The Curse of the Iguana," he muttered to himself, slouched in the rain.

and the Chamber of Commerce was handing out cyanide capsules.

Stranahan hadn't wanted to give up his job, but it had been discreetly explained that for political reasons the state attorney could not keep on staff an investigator (even a productive one) who had killed a duly elected judge (even a crooked one). So Stranahan had accepted the ludicrous buyout and purchased himself an old wooden stilt house in Biscayne Bay, where he had lived mostly unmolested for years until Hurricane Andrew smashed the place to splinters.

What happened to your eye, young lady?" "I fell down the stairs. What happened to your hair?

The innards of Ping's G5 were supposedly computer-engineered with a process called "finite-element analysis," a term that for all I know was stolen from an old Star Trek episode.

Stranahan didn't consider himself an eccentric or a hermit, even though at age fifty-three he lived alone on an island at the edge of the Atlantic with no landline, satellite dish or personal computer.

ONE of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption: There was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you.

sucking on a football.

I don't care if you pack it in fucking kryptonite, that lottery ticket ain't going up your ass.

Detective Karl Rolvaag belonged in the Midwest. This he knew in his heart, and he was reminded of it every day when he went to work.

Florida needs a special prison for tourists. Not all tourists—just the ones who trash the place, rob, shoplift, vandalize, drive drunk, assault the cops, puke in the alleys, pee in the medians, and so on.

The detective had moved to Fort Lauderdale from St. Paul because his wife had inexplicably yearned to experience humidity. A decade later she was back in the Twin Cities and Rolvaag was still in Florida, divorced and sweating like a hog for eleven and a half months of the year.

The man was a hog: a florid, jowly, pug-nosed, rheumy-eyed hog. A cosmetic surgeon's nightmare. Rudy Graveline couldn't bear to watch him eat.

This is not a well person. This is a man who put a shock collar on your husband, a man who gets high off frog slime. He's done things you don't want to know about, probably even killed people.' 'At least he believes in something.

You know what this is? A test, that's what. That slippery, hot-blooded weasel is trying to push me as far as he can. He thinks I'm not tough enough. He wants mucho macho. He wants machetes and machine pistols and nightscopes. He wants us to dress in fatigues and crawl through minefields and bite the necks off live chickens. That's his idea of revolution. No subtlety, no wit, no goddamn style.

Bernal believed discipline was essential for revolution. Wiley, of course, believed just the opposite.

Her affliction was one of the heart, not the brain. She felt things too deeply and acted on those feelings, and for that there was no known cure. It would explain why all those medicines never worked.

So with the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, in 1980 Sparky Harper invited fifty travel writers from all newspapers all across North America to come to Miami during Orange Bowl Week and sail the Friendship Cruise. Of course, 1980 was the year of the Liberty City Riots and the Mariel Boatlift, so only nine travel writers showed up, several of them carrying guns for protection.

Late on the night of August 27, with a warm breeze at his back and nine cold Budweisers in his belly, Keith Higstrom decided to go hunting. His friends declined to accompany him, as Keith was as clumsy and unreliable a shooter as he was a drunk.

Bode Gazzer was five feet six and had never forgiven his parents for it. He wore three-inch snakeskin shitkickers and walked with a swagger that suggested not brawn so much as hemorrhoidal tribulation.

Like all terrible golfers, Dr. Remond Courtney believed that nothing was too extravagant for his game. He wore Arnold Palmer sweaters and Tom Watson spikes, and carried a full set of Jack Nicklaus MacGregors, including a six-wood that the Golden Bear himself couldn't hit if his life depended on it.