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’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.
Hey. Sometimes to conclusions.
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.
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.
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.
The one word that no politician will ever speak, is ‘enough.’ Enough.
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.
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.
I’ve always enjoyed making people laugh. But in order for me to be funny, I have to get ticked off about something.
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.
Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod’s distance from the actual moviemaking.
I’ve never progressed very far from my days as a smart aleck in middle school.
It’s easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.
The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.