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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.

Harlan Coben

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Harlan Coben
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 4
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More quotes by Harlan Coben

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This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth.
Harlan Coben
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In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
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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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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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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.
Harlan Coben
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...better to have loved and lost bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.
Harlan Coben
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When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.
Harlan Coben
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Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
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
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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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I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.
Harlan Coben
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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.
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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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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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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Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.
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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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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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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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