Top 100 Carl Hiaasen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.”

— Carl Hiaasen

2. “My father used to say that you live most of your life inside your own head, so make sure it’s a good space.”

— Carl Hiaasen

3. “That’s what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.”

— Carl Hiaasen

4. “The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”

— Carl Hiaasen

5. “I’m waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh’s pharmacist writes a book.”

— Carl Hiaasen

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Carl Hiaasen

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Officer Delinko thought the bald man must have a good sense of humor to go by such a nickname, but he was wrong. Curly was cranky and unsmiling.”

— Carl Hiaasen

13. “If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there’s just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.”

— Carl Hiaasen

14. “Jimmy Lee Baylis was a wise man, and knew better than to talk back to the man who signed his paycheck.”

— Carl Hiaasen

15. “Guess I’ll have to come back another day and try again, Roy thought. That’s what a real Florida boy would do.”

— Carl Hiaasen

16. “Mickey Cray had been out of work ever since a dead iguana fell from a palm tree and hit him on the head.”

— Carl Hiaasen

17. “The first thing that the boy called Smoke told Nick Waters was: “Your biology book’s in my locker. The combination is 5-3-5.” And the second thing he said was: “I didn’t do that fire, man. I’m innocent.”

— Carl Hiaasen

18. “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

19. “Sunset on the water ought to be a quiet and easy time, but I guess some people can’t stand a little silence.”

— Carl Hiaasen

20. “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

21. “Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.”

— Carl Hiaasen

22. “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

23. “Nobody said he was Alvin Einstein.”

— Carl Hiaasen

24. “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

25. “So for a while, they sat peacefully in the swamp, listening to Mrs. Starch hum while the little panther slurped happily and the emerald leaves overhead shimmered and shook in the sunlight.”

— Carl Hiaasen

26. “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

27. “The evening news made her wonder if God was dead; the morning sun made her believe He wasn’t.”

— Carl Hiaasen

28. “Just because something was legal didn’t automatically make it right.”

— Carl Hiaasen

29. “Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.”

— 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. “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

32. “I think it’s always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod’s distance from the actual moviemaking.”

— Carl Hiaasen

33. “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

34. “One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.”

— Carl Hiaasen

35. “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

36. “Dessert was an over baked chocolate chip cookies the size of a hockey puck and just about as tasty.”

— Carl Hiaasen

37. “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

38. “Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.”

— Carl Hiaasen

39. “I’ve never progressed very far from my days as a smart aleck in middle school.”

— Carl Hiaasen

40. “The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.”

— Carl Hiaasen

41. “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

42. “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

43. “The one word that no politician will ever speak, is ‘enough.’ Enough.”

— Carl Hiaasen

44. “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

45. “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

46. “There is no writer’s block in a newsroom. There’s only unemployment block.”

— Carl Hiaasen

47. “Still the congenitally clueless – tourists and locals alike – continue to flop into the Gulf and mess with these phenomenal creatures, dooming them to a future of begging, sloth, and worse. A dolphin that swims close enough to take a treat from your fingers is also close enough to be stabbed by a scumbag with a screwdriver.”

— Carl Hiaasen

48. “It’s easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.”

— Carl Hiaasen

49. “Nobody from the Amazing Kingdom bothered to check with previous employers, such as the New York City Police Department, to inquire about allegations of bribery, moral turpitude, substance abuse, witness tampering and the unnecessary use of deadly force, to wit, the pistol-whipping of a young man suspected of shoplifting a bag of cheese-flavored Doritos.”

— Carl Hiaasen

50. “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