Quotes from Carl Hiaasen

Sparky Harper and the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce adored travel writers because travel writers never wrote stories about street crime, water pollution, fish kills, beach erosion, refugees, AIDS epidemics, nuclear accidents, cocaine smugglers, gun-runners, or race riots. Once in a while, a daring travel writer would mention one of these subjects in passing, but strictly in the context of a minor setback from which South Florida was pluckily rebounding.

The answer is, nothing's going to happen to you. The friend who called, he put in a good word.' 'Oh, yeah?' 'Jail will not make an impression on this woman. Don't waste your time.' That's a quote.

Mick Stranahan's sister was married to a lawyer named Kipper Garth, inept in all aspects of the profession except self-promotion.

subsisting mostly on Popsicles and so-called

Rick noticed that the man who'd overpowered them was tall though not very muscle-bound. He wondered how such a routine dude could have hit them so hard. Possibly the man was high on crystal meth or bath salts. That's what Rick intended to tell his friends at the gym, when they asked what the fuck had happened to his face.

The vista from atop the poinciana was timeless and serene—a long string of egrets crossing the distant 'glades; a squadron of white pelicans circling a nearby bay; a pair of ospreys hovering kitelike above a tidal creek. It was a perfect picture and a perfect silence.

This is the worst year of my life, and it's only the seventeenth of January.

The classroom fell quiet, a long heavy silence that roared in Roy's ears like a train.

Nobody with a living brain cell goes into the newspaper business for the money. They're in it because digging up the truth is interesting and consequential work, and for sheer entertainment it beats the hell out of humping product for GE or Microsoft.

The country we both fought for is getting ass-raped by a paranoid, draft-dodging, whore-hopping—

losing his hair. "Ms. Chase and me

Ellis dutifully opens the top half of the bisected lid... and there's Jimmy Stoma. All things considered, he looks pretty darn spiffy. Better, in fact, than he did on some of his album covers. He's so lean and fit, you wouldn't guess he once outweighed Meat Loaf.

Burnout is common because of the long hours, the crummy pay and the depressing nature of so much of what we write. As the saying goes, they never send us to the airport when the plane lands safely.

Here, inmates would spend seven days and six nights being drilled on vacation etiquette. For example, they'd be taught how to read speed-limit signs; how to park within the parallel lines of a parking space; how to drink and dispose of alcohol; how to vomit inconspicuously; how to steer a Jet Ski and chew gum at the same time.… The drill instructors would be selected from an elite pool of former Highway Patrol troopers, ex–Navy SEALs, and retired tour guides from Epcot.

Since becoming chief, he'd also been well served by an uncommon immunity to condescension.

Each week the writers strived to portray the brothers on a social bandwidth halfway between harmless rednecks and odious white trash. It was a precarious tightwire. From

The sitting President of the United States was a soulless imbecile who hated the outdoors, but in Angie's view, at this point Teddy Roosevelt himself couldn't turn the tide if he came back from the dead. All the treasured wilderness that had been sacrificed at the altar of growth was gone for all time. More disappeared every day; nothing ever changed except the speed of destruction, and only because there were fewer pristine pieces to sell off, carve up and pave.

Carla Crumworthy, heiress to the Crumworthy panty-shield fortune. She had come to complain about the collagen injections that Rudy Graveline had administered to give her full, sensual lips, which is just what every rheumatoid seventy-one-year-old woman

One day he came home to find her burning his collection of heavy-metal CDs, which she had taken to calling "devil wafers." She

had begun to drizzle, so they relocated to a latticed gazebo used for waterfront weddings and the occasional renegade bris.

Maggad glances nervously around. He's well on the way to regretting this incursion into the newsroom, where he stands out like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl. He might own the place, but he doesn't belong.

All because my husband doesn't trust anyone with an Islamic name. Or Jews, or blacks, or Asians, or Hispanics, or Mormons, or whatever. God, it's exhausting to keep track. With my accent, I'm amazed he married me.

We're much more efficient at carnage now. Try your very hardest not to participate.

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