Harlan Coben Quotes

The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.

Only bad writers think they're good.

You bring your own weather to the picnic.

Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.

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

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.

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.

The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time.

Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy

Memories, you see, hurt. The good ones most of all.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.

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

Im 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.

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.

There's always a price you pay when you lie. Once you introduce a lie into a relationship, even for the best of intentions, it is always there. Whenever you’re with that person again, that lie is in the room too. It sits on your shoulder. Good lie or bad lie, it's in the room with you forever now. It's your constant companion.

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.

Kids don’t do what their parents say-they do what they see their parents do. So who was to blame here?

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

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

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.

Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.

..."better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.

Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.

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.