I've always enjoyed making people laugh. But in order for me to be funny, I have to get ticked off about something.

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.

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

The TV commercials, which are endless and fairly crass, gave birth to Brock, the bad-lawyer character in Razor Girl. In real life you can find even sleazier examples than him.

I still do a weekly opinion column for the Miami Herald, and it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Rotten fish.

Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.

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.