Carl Hiaasen

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

We've always been fascinated with movie stars and singers, but the fascination with people who really have nothing to offer is something new. ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

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 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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”