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I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.

Harlan Coben

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Harlan Coben
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Lewis
Jerry
Crime
Fiction

More quotes by Harlan Coben

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Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent.
Harlan Coben
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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.
Harlan Coben
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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).
Harlan Coben
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I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it's always there. Only bad writers think they're good.
Harlan Coben
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A trial is two narratives competing for your attention.
Harlan Coben
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Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.
Harlan Coben
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You want this so badly—this second chance, this chance at real redemption—that you can’t see the truth.
Harlan Coben
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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.
Harlan Coben
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Getting into a fight with a popular senior. Pissing off a school teacher and the local chief of police. Hanging with two major-league losers. She slapped my back. Welcome to high school.
Harlan Coben
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For a short time, I hated them. But when you think about it, what good does that do?It takes so much to hold on to hate—you lose your grip on what's important, you know?
Harlan Coben
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I've never chased the dollar, I've always chased the reader's heart. I love having more readers. The more people who read it, the more thrilled I am.
Harlan Coben
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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.
Harlan Coben
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I still try to make the next book my best book. I want to grip and move you in unexpected ways.
Harlan Coben
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In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart.
Harlan Coben
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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.
Harlan Coben
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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
Harlan Coben
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A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.
Harlan Coben
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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.
Harlan Coben
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I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.
Harlan Coben
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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.
Harlan Coben