Harlan Coben Quotes

If I had, say, a tall, amateur male lead living on the campus of a rural college (Six Years), the next book might feature a short, cop who lives in the heart of Manhattan (Missing You).

I would rather raise certain topics and maybe let you ruminate on them. I'm not big on answering them.

So basically your plan is to flail about helplessly.

The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time. I don't do too many notes. I keep it mostly in my head. I usually start writing a new book around January, and it's due October 1.

There is a certain fate to the universe and a certain randomness.

I once worked as a tour guide in the Costa del Sol of Spain.

Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something

You don't worry about happiness and fulfilment when you're starving.

Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you're looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need.

We all think that we are uniquely complex, that no one can see what we are thinking - yet we also believe that we have the rare ability to read others. This fascinates me at the moment.

There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can't know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy.

Its funny how you can let yourself forget for seconds, how even in the heat of the horrible, you can have moments when you fool yourself into thinking it might all be okay

I'm also inspired by anything that I consider great. It makes me want to raise my game too - Hitchcock movies, Hopper paintings, Springsteen concerts.

"So basically, that entire theory is blown to hell."Not basically," Win corrected. "Entirely."

Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.

I'm thinking of taking up golf, but the idea of spending time with golfers frightens me.

The most annoying and full- of- crap thing a writer says is, I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it. A writer without a reader doesn't exist.

I like to go out and write. So I'll often go to a Starbucks or a local coffee bar, and I'll sit there and I'll write. I can write pretty much anywhere.

I'd never had money growing up, and it's never been that important to me, except maybe to take our kids on a nice vacation or something like that.

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.

Muse usually gestured like an amphetamine-fueled Sicilian who's nearly gotten clipped by a speeding car.

A friend once told Megan that we are always seventeen years old, waiting for our lives to begin. More than ever, clutching to this man, Megan understood that.

Her smile shames the sun

The gray has no chance against that smile. It vanishes in a wonderful haze of bright color.

A voice flat enough to fit under a door crack.

Secrets...were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk.

Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up. Ray Levine was one of those people.

He tried to read, but the words swam in front of his eyes in meaningless waves. He put on the television. Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.

You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.

Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.

I'm not a big sports fan.

'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.