Quotes from Carl Hiaasen

The whereabouts of the other Nance brothers-- Clee Roy, Buddy, and Junior--had been ascertained. They were chilling at the forty-acre Pensacola estate leased by the network and used as an outdoor set for the fractious family barbecue scenes that closed each episode. Down the road a stretch was the rooster farm, which the clan avoided except during taping days, because of the stench.

Malley told the shrink that she'd run away because Justin

Honey understood that every dickhead she encountered was not necessarily a menace to her son, yet still she struggled with a rabid intolerance of callousness and folly, both of which abounded in South Florida.

A.Q., Keyes remembered, stood for Asshole Quotient. Skip Wiley had a well-known theory that the quality of life declined in direct proportion to the Asshole Quotient. According to Wiley's reckoning, Miami had 134 total assholes per square mile, giving it the worst A.Q. in North America. In second place was Aspen, Colorado (101), with Malibu Beach, California, finishing third at 97.

Erin thought, ludicrously, of how disappointed her mother would be. When one's only daughter is hacked to death wearing a sequined bra top and a G-string--well, there's really no way to explain it to one's friends at the orchid club.

Confrontation,' he declared, 'is the essence of nature!' He shook his silvery braid loose and let his hair stream out behind him. 'Confrontation is the rhythm of life,' he went on. 'In nature violence is pure and purposeful, one species against another in an act of survival!' Terrific, Decker thought. Marlin Perkins on PCP.

It amazed him that people could be so tactless. Being a disfigured felon carried weight in certain social circles, though apparently not on South Beach.

Naw, but I've slept through a few. It's easier than

Ricca, the witch, was alive. God only knew what Red Hammernut was up to. The blackmailer wanted the money tomorrow night. And topping it all was the videocassette that had been waiting on Charles Perrone's doorstep when he returned home from church. The tape was grainy and underlit, but the images were sufficiently distinct that Chaz instantly realized what he was watching.

Andrew couldn't stand politics and generally detested the senators and congressmen who paid so exorbitantly for his image-shaping skills. Desie came to admire Andrew for hating his own work--only a highly principled man would stand up and admit to wasting his God-given talent on something so shallow, manipulative and deceptive as a thirty-second campaign commercial.

Again, Urbana had offered valuable counsel: 'A nice smile beats forty-inch jugs any day!

the proposition that all mankind's creations should be appraised not just for their beauty or ingenuity, but for what they revealed about the mystery of the human mind.

And don't forget, this was South Florida, the Medicare fraud capital of America, where the most experienced dirtballs came to gorge. Stripling had found himself competing against the slickest and slimiest--former mortgage brokers, identity thieves, arms dealers, insider traders and dope smugglers, all who'd switched to home-care durables because stealing directly from the government was so much easier, and the risk so small.

Cuban cigars

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

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.

Humor can be an incredible lacerating and effective weapon. And that is the way I use it.

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.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

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.

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.

Kids feel so strongly about what's going on today and what's happening to the world, and that's very inspiring. I feel more hopeful than ever before about the future.

From my experience, politicians are much more uncomfortable being made fun of than they are being preached at and screeched at - you know, and the soapbox routine. They're much more uneasy knowing they're a target of ridicule.