A biography for Carl Hiaasenhasn’t been written yet.
“The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”
“To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.”
“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.”
“I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid.”
“Sunset on the water ought to be a quiet and easy time, but I guess some people can't stand a little silence.”
“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.”
“Remember what happened last time with the 'cuda.”
“It's easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.”
“My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.”
“as a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. .....”
“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.”
“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.”
“People say sometimes, gosh, that was brave of you to write such-and-such last week. 'Brave?' What do they mean 'brave?' It's right! How could you not write it?”
“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 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.”
“Hey. Sometimes life is a shit flavored Popsicle.”
“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.”
“The classroom fell quiet, a long heavy silence that roared in Roy's ears like a train.”
“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.”
“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.”