Top 100 Hiaasen Quotes
#1. If Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake had a literary love child, he would be Timothy Hallinan.
Julia Spencer-Fleming
#2. Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books, because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket, then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering.
Carl Hiaasen
#3. Only because you're injured," she said, and kissed him again. He pulled her close. "How's this going to work with all these stitches? Do I have to keep standing?" "Well," whispered Rosa, "I suppose you could kneel." Yancy lifted her sundress. "You're the doctor.
Carl Hiaasen
#4. Maureen closed her eyes. " Listen to me, Earl. It's yourself you ought to be thinking about. Life goes by so darn fast, every wasted moment is a crime." One blue eye opened and fixed on him. "And every crime is a wasted moment.
Carl Hiaasen
#5. Her given name was Lucinda but she'd called herself Juveline since age fifteen, when she'd been caught selling knockoff Burberry totes and a cop at the booking desk misspelled the word "juvenile." Big
Carl Hiaasen
#7. The boy manifested the sort of submissive dimness that foretold a long sad future in minimum-security institutions
Carl Hiaasen
#8. Remember what happened last time with the 'cuda.
Carl Hiaasen
#9. For once Yancy didn't mind driving to Miami. Dr. Rosa Campesino had agreed to meet for lunch. On the Eighteen-Mile Stretch he got stuck behind a minivan with a CHOOSE LIFE bumper sticker. "Choose the accelerator! How's that for starters?" Yancy was shouting, pounding on the horn.
Carl Hiaasen
#10. 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.
Carl Hiaasen
#11. My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.
Carl Hiaasen
#12. Though Madeleine's face reminded Dr. Graveline in many ways of a camel, he was fond of her. She was the kind of steady patient that offshore trust funds are made of.
Carl Hiaasen
#13. Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.
Carl Hiaasen
#14. Whatever happens, I'm glad we ate that bleeping lizard.
Carl Hiaasen
#15. 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
#16. You from the IRS? The man's voice was deep and wet, like mud slipping down a drain.
Carl Hiaasen
#17. Mickey Cray was surprised to learn that Derek Badger didn't want any of his captive critters on location. Mickey had never wrangled for a nature show that used only wild animals, nor had he ever encountered a person less qualified than Derek to handle untamed specimens.
Carl Hiaasen
#18. Shreave flicked away the dead mosquito. "Don't these things carry the bird flu too?"
"No Boyd, that would be a bird.
Carl Hiaasen
#19. If anything is more irresistible than Jesus, it's Mickey.
Carl Hiaasen
#20. From the bow of the canoe she asked, "Do you know a rain dance?"
"First I need a virgin.
Carl Hiaasen
#21. Malley told the shrink that she'd run away because Justin
Carl Hiaasen
#23. 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.
Carl Hiaasen
#24. It was inevitable that the poacher and the counterfeiter would bond, sharing as they did a blanket contempt for government, taxes, homosexuals, immigrants, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest work.
Carl Hiaasen
#25. Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I've read in years. The characters are marvelously unique, the setting is intoxicating and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn't want to put it down.
Carl Hiaasen
#26. I'm waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh's pharmacist writes a book.
Carl Hiaasen
#27. 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.
Carl Hiaasen
#28. They have a crystalline sense of right and wrong; it disappears when they walk out the door with their M.B.A.
Carl Hiaasen
#29. As far as I'm concerned, the gator that ate T.C. deserves a medal from Crime Stoppers.
Carl Hiaasen
#30. The man's a born straggler, Honey thought, another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would've been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger.
Carl Hiaasen
#31. 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
#32. Right now there's a pair of bad cops on their way out here to shoot me."
"You don't know that."
"Yeah, you're right," Stranahan said. "They're probably just collecting Toys for Tots. Now go.
Carl Hiaasen
#33. 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
#34. Wahoo's father had absolutely no use for creeps who beat on small animals, especially kids.
Carl Hiaasen
#35. The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.
Carl Hiaasen
#36. he was bitten in the groin by a Belgian shepherd trainee named Kong, and he required three operations, culminating in a scrotal graft from a Brahma steer.
Carl Hiaasen
#37. The victim's hand was contracted into a fist except for the middle digit, which was rigidly extended.
Carl Hiaasen
#38. There's so much hate that we direct externally that we forget we have our own psychos. But that's the role of the satirist - you have to examine your own country and say, 'look!'
Carl Hiaasen
#39. I think it's always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod's distance from the actual moviemaking.
Carl Hiaasen
#40. But Erin let it slide. The child was only four years old; she had a whole lifetime to learn about sadness. Today was for Dalmatians, ice cream and new dolls.
Carl Hiaasen
#41. Roy remembered the time he and his father had a talk about fighting. 'It's important to stand up for what's right,' Mr. Eberhardt had said, 'but sometimes there's a fine line between courage and stupidity.
Carl Hiaasen
#42. As frightening as this may sound, what you see in the books is the way I see the world. And so far I haven't seen anything, either in Florida or elsewhere, to dissuade me from it.
Carl Hiaasen
#43. 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.
Carl Hiaasen
#44. 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
#45. Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.
Carl Hiaasen
#46. Cell phone the night he died. She'd obtained this key information
Carl Hiaasen
#47. My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.
Carl Hiaasen
#48. 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
#49. I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid.
Carl Hiaasen
#50. It occurred to Yancy that, in the time they'd known each other, he hadn't once seen her look at her cell phone. She never texted, tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, or posted a single picture when they were together. He found this behavior alluring.
Carl Hiaasen
#52. From the pancake house I drive directly to the county morgue. The contrast is not especially striking.
Carl Hiaasen
#53. No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add.
Carl Hiaasen
#54. In his own mind, it was never a matter of courage. But courage it was.
Carl Hiaasen
#55. My roommate is a 240-pound homicidal hermit. For dinner he's fixing me a dead fox he scraped off the highway near Ponchatoula, and after that we're taking a leaky tin boat out on a windy lake to spy on some semi-retarded fishermen. Don't you wish you were here?
Carl Hiaasen
#56. I've always enjoyed making people laugh. But in order for me to be funny, I have to get ticked off about something.
Carl Hiaasen
#57. 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
#58. She said there was no tactful way for a naked person to cope with a runny nose, especially while dancing. Orly grudgingly agreed.
Carl Hiaasen
#59. I've never progressed very far from my days as a smart aleck in middle school.
Carl Hiaasen
#60. If God was my co-pilot, Yancy once groused to Burton, I'd have the fucking pedal to the metal soon as I left the garage.
Carl Hiaasen
#61. The dog proved to be as dumb and stubborn as a mud fence, so Stranahan had named him Strom.
Carl Hiaasen
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the other hand that.' You're getting paid for your opinion.
Carl Hiaasen
#66. 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
Carl Hiaasen
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Carl Hiaasen
#70. 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.
Carl Hiaasen
#71. 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
#73. Informed opponents of Obama's healthcare initiative have expressed dismay at the low level of discourse.
Carl Hiaasen
#74. Watching the cab speed off, Wahoo's father looked forlorn. "It's like she's leaving us twice," he remarked. "What are you talking about, Pop?" "I'm seein' double, remember? There she goes - and there she goes again.
Carl Hiaasen
#75. Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.
Carl Hiaasen
#76. The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.
Carl Hiaasen
#77. My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.
Carl Hiaasen
#78. Sometimes you're going to be faced with situations where the line isn't clear between what's right and what's wrong.Your heart will tell you to do one thing and your brain will tell you to do something different. In the end, all that's left is to look at both sides and go with your best judgment.
Carl Hiaasen
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. The one word that no politician will ever speak, is 'enough.' Enough.
Carl Hiaasen
#83. Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.
Carl Hiaasen
#84. That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.
Carl Hiaasen
#85. and in the meantime don't jump to conclusions.
Carl Hiaasen
#86. I don't care if you pack it in fucking kryptonite, that lottery ticket ain't going up your ass.
Carl Hiaasen
#87. Don't order the fish," Yancy advised Merry when they sat down. "But it's a seafood joint." "More like a petri dish with menus. When they say 'catch of the day,' they mean infection." Brennan
Carl Hiaasen
#88. I married an asshole, she thought, knifing into the waves.
Carl Hiaasen
#89. 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?
Carl Hiaasen
#90. The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.
Carl Hiaasen
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. A well-regulated militia," Bode added, "like they talk about in the Second Amendment." "Oh," said Shiner. He hadn't read the first one yet.
Carl Hiaasen
#95. There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.
Carl Hiaasen
#96. The Thieves of Manhattan is a sly and cutting riff on the book-publishing world that is quite funny unless you happen to be an author, in which case the novel will make you consider a more sensible profession-like being a rodeo clown, for example, or a crab-fisherman in the Bering Sea.
Carl Hiaasen
#97. My father's a large man, very strong, but he says fighting is for people who can't win with their brains. He also says there are times when you've got no choice but to defend yourself from common morons.
Carl Hiaasen
#98. It's easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.
Carl Hiaasen
#99. And the Chamber of Commerce was handing out cyanide capsules.
Carl Hiaasen
#100. Jimmy Lee Baylis was a wise man, and knew better than to talk back to the man who signed his paycheck.
Carl Hiaasen
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