Harlan Coben Quotes

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The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

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.

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.

I never bought the excuse of not having time to write. If you really want to do it, you're either going to find those hours or eventually decide not to be a writer.

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.

I'm not very happy idle. There's always this voice in my head that says, 'I should be writing.'

I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it's always there. Only bad writers think they're good.

I'm a little bit of a control freak.

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'm 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize: We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin.

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

I am, after all, a thriller writer. I routinely delve into the darkest chambers of the human heart. I've written about murder, kidnapping, depravity, horror, violence, and disfigurement.

Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything.

Children learn much more from how you act than from what you tell them. There are times this worries me - we parents are rarely the role models we want to be. True for life. True for driving.

You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad.

This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.

Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.

More than once, I've wished my real life had a delete key.

In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.

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.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!'

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.

'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.

I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you?

I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.

If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills. Clearly I'm not meant to do anything else.

The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea - wink, wink.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

Writing isn't about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

If I don't write, I hate myself. Simple as that. My life is out of balance.

The muse is not an angelic voice that sits on your shoulder and sings sweetly. The muse is the most annoying whine. The muse isn't hard to find, just hard to like - she follows you everywhere, tapping you on the shoulder, demanding that you stop doing whatever else you might be doing and pay attention to her.

I love stories. When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.

My house has too many distractions. There's the email. There's checking my Amazon ranking. I know I'm the only author who's ever done that, ever. There's the fax. Too many distractions. I like to go out and write.

We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York.

No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis.

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