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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
Illness
Line
Crazy
Lines
Wrong
Unstable
Persons
Mentally
Person
Catch
Insight

More quotes by 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.
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Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
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I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.
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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.
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What I love about the thriller form is that it makes you write a story. You can't get lost in your own genius, which is a dangerous place for writers. You don't want to ever get complacent. If a book starts going too well, I usually know there's a problem. I need to struggle. I need that self-doubt. I need to think it's not the best thing ever.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.
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I don't necessarily love the sports per se, I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us, why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.
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In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
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Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.
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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.
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Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.
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A trial is two narratives competing for your attention.
Harlan Coben