Florida

“I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humourous, and continued from there. I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth.”

“Here in Florida … we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland — the blessing of size. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.”

“When I was twelve, I helped my Daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement, because some damn fool parked a dozen warheads ninety miles off the coast of Florida. This thing could park a coupla' hundred warheads off Washington or New York and no-one would know anything about it until it was all over.”

“I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.”

“Legendary was Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure ground. Here, on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built. One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu's mountain.”

“Where the hell's Fiji? Near Florida?”

“California, Florida, whatever. Either way, your pale ass is getting a tan.”

“There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green.”

“A few things for themselves, Disclose to the lover.”

“One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled.”

“Just not being senile is considered great down here.”

“There was a guy down in Florida who said that, at the age of 53 years old, he was in good enough physical condition to withstand the wind, rain and hail of a force-3 hurricane. Now, let me explain somethin' to ya: it isn't that the wind is blowin', it's what the wind is blowin'. If you get hit by a Volvo, it doesn't matter how many sit-ups you did that morning.”