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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

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Harlan Coben
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Lines
Wrong
Unstable
Persons
Mentally
Person
Catch
Insight
Illness
Line
Crazy

More quotes by Harlan Coben

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I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night. I want to stir the pulse, yes, but also to stir the heart. I hope 'The Woods' does that.
Harlan Coben
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Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.
Harlan Coben
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William Goldman's Marathon Man was a novel that taught me about suspense. I was maybe 16 years old when I read it and I remember thinking, You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't put this book down. I loved that feeling - and want to give it others.
Harlan Coben
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The first sip of beer on a hot day is like that first finger-dip when you open a new jar of peanut butter.
Harlan Coben
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I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.
Harlan Coben
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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.
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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In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart.
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 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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In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That's the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That's part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.
Harlan Coben
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It was one lesson he never forgot.You don't sit back when you or a loved one is being assaulted.And you don't act like the goverment with their proportional responses and all that nonsense.If someone hurts you,mercy and pity must be put aside,You eliminate the enemy.You scorch the earth.
Harlan Coben
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Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent.
Harlan Coben
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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.
Harlan Coben
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Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once
Harlan Coben
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An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.
Harlan Coben
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You don't worry about happiness and fulfilment when you're starving.
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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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