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Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

Since the nineteen-fifties, rural Florida has marketed itself to Northerners and Midwesterners as an unexplored paradise of citrus and mermaids.

If you look at the map, there's Thrace, Greece, Bulgaria, and there's tiny Gallipoli. It is such a small part of the whole peninsula, and yet you only hear about this little tiny bit.

Florida is a place of unparalleled diversity of backgrounds, experiences and vision. It makes our culture unique, but it can also make it difficult to define a common identity and create a sense of community that reaches beyond our neighborhoods to all corners of our state.

Florida is a strange place: hot, beautiful, ugly. I love it here, and how nothing makes sense but still, somehow, there is a rhythm.

It doesn't matter how much I think I know about Florida, it still flips me on the head every time. It's just an absurd, eclectic place, and the stories that can come out of that place just never stop.

I went to Florida when I was 15. That was my first time in America, so you learn about how different the regions are.

There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them.

When I looked around, with my wife, Sarasota seemed like the best place in Florida. We settled about one mile from Siesta Key.

Florida is one of the first states that sort of gives the legislature a very clear criteria for re-drawing electoral district maps. Basically, all the criteria do is tell the legislators that you can't draw a seat that helps yourself or a political party. That's really critical.