Bill Yarbrough

“When people ask me whether I am a spy –‘are you now, or have you ever been?’ –I am tempted to reply with a hearty –‘Yes, and since the age of five.’ For a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of a secret agent. A writer, like a spy, must prey upon his neighbours; like a spy he is dependent on those whom he deceives; like a spy he must somehow contrive to keep a distance from his own feelings and by doing so conjure up a package that will meet with the approval of his masters. Like a spy, he is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive..”
― John le Carré

“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, Double Whammy

“The deceased was a well-known scumbucket and they don’t usually have the decency to kill themselves. Usually someone else does the honor.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Native Tongue

“Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!”
― Mark A. Cooper, Operation Einstein