Top 300 Harlan Coben Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Myron lay sprawled next to a knee-knockingly gorgeous brunette clad only in a Class-B-felony bikini, a tropical drink sans umbrella in one hand, the aqua clear Caribbean water lapping at his feet, the sand a dazzling white powder, the sky a pure blue that could only be God’s blank canvas, the sun a soothing and rich as a Swedish masseur with a snifter of cognac, and he was intensely miserable.”

— Harlan Coben

52. “I shall drink no wine before its time. Okay, it’s time.”

— Harlan Coben

53. “I once worked as a tour guide in the Costa del Sol of Spain.”

— Harlan Coben

54. “We all think that we are uniquely complex, that no one can see what we are thinking – yet we also believe that we have the rare ability to read others. This fascinates me at the moment.”

— Harlan Coben

55. “America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.”

— Harlan Coben

56. “Some people claim that money is the root of all evil. Could be. Others say that money can’t buy you happiness. That may be true. But if you handle it right, money buys you freedom and time, and those are a lot more tangible than happiness.”

— Harlan Coben

57. “Death is so close, always, a breath away, so perhaps it was wise to introduce children to that concept at an early age. Maya.”

— Harlan Coben

58. “But grief likes to hide behind bushes. It enjoys leaping out of nowhere, startling you, mocking you, stripping away your pretense of normalcy. Grief lulls you to sleep, thus making that blindside hit all the more jarring.”

— Harlan Coben

59. “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

60. “He traveled back again, to when she was that adorable teenager dominating center court, and his favorite Yiddish expression came back to him in a rush: Man plans, God laughs. This was not a kind laugh. “Kitty?”

— Harlan Coben

61. “Do you believe in love at first sight? Neither do I. I do, however, believe in major, more-than-just-physical attraction at first sight. I believe that every once in a while – once, maybe twice in a lifetime – you are drawn to someone so deeply, so primordially, so immediately – a stronger-than-magnetic pull. That was how it was with Natalie. Sometimes that is all there is. Sometimes it grows and gathers heat and turns into a glorious inferno that you know is real and meant to last forever. And.”

— Harlan Coben

62. “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

63. “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

64. “The humpback never sees the hump on his own back.”

— Harlan Coben

65. “Myron likes to say that even the ugliest truth is better than the prettiest of lies.”

— Harlan Coben

66. “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

67. “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

68. “In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.”

— Harlan Coben

69. “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.”

— Harlan Coben

70. “It was true what they said: The older you become, the more you are like your parents. Soon he’d be telling a kid not to stick his elbow out the car window or he’d lose it.”

— Harlan Coben

71. “The most annoying and full- of- crap thing a writer says is, I write only for myself, I don’t care if anyone reads it. A writer without a reader doesn’t exist.”

— Harlan Coben

72. “But sometimes, maybe most times, it isn’t that clear. It is dark and you are near the edge of a cliff, but you’re moving slowly, not sure which direction you’re heading in. Your steps are tentative but they are still blind in the night. You don’t realize how close you are to the edge, how the soft earth could give away, how you could just slip a bit and suddenly plunge into the dark.”

— Harlan Coben

73. “Kids don’t come with instruction manuals,” and you quickly learn that your child comes to you hardwired, that in the battle of nature vs nurture, nature kicks complete and total ass – still, when things go wrong, when something this dark invades your child’s soul, you can only wonder where the hell you went wrong.”

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

75. “They say you never know how someone will react when the grenade is thrown.”

— Harlan Coben

76. “Here is the truth about tragedy: it’s good for the soul.”

— Harlan Coben

77. “There is a certain fate to the universe and a certain randomness.”

— Harlan Coben

78. “Dreams are fragile. Dreams don’t last.”

— Harlan Coben

79. “By the time he got back to the table, Tad Crispin was sipping an iced tea too. Win made the introductions. Crispin was dressed in yellows, lots of yellows, kind of like the man with the yellow hat from the Curious George books. Everything was yellow. Even his golf shoes. Myron tried not to make a face. As.”

— Harlan Coben

80. “My house has too many distractions. There’s the email. There’s checking my Amazon ranking. I know I’m the only author who’s ever done that, ever. There’s the fax. Too many distractions. I like to go out and write.”

— Harlan Coben

81. “Win’s phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Articulate. Okay, put it through.” Two seconds later he handed the phone to Myron. “For me?” Myron asked. Win gave him flat eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m handing you the phone because it’s too heavy for me.” Everyone’s a wiseass.”

— Harlan Coben

82. “Sure, on a larger scale, it was healthy to have people out there you cared about more than yourself. She knew that. But then there was the abject fear you would lose it. They say possessions own you. Not so. Loved ones own you. You are forever held hostage once you care so much.”

— Harlan Coben

83. “Each writer had a bedroom in the main house and a shack or “work cottage” in which to write. We all met up for dinner at night. That was it. There was no Internet, no TV, no phones, yes lights, but no motorcar, not a single luxury.”

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

85. “Being this handsome. It is not easy, you realize.’ ‘And yet you suffer without complaint.”

— Harlan Coben

86. “Fat Gandhi was resplendent in what looked to be a yellow zoot suit. “The cash is in that bag?” “It isn’t in my underwear,” Myron said.”

— Harlan Coben

87. “You could trust nature but not man.”

— Harlan Coben

88. “Grief can be inordinately selfish.”

— Harlan Coben

89. “Frankly I’m fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.”

— Harlan Coben

90. “Libraries for me have always had a cathedral-like ambiance, a hushed sanctuary where learning is revered, where we the people elevate books and education to the level of the religious.”

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

92. “There should have been a dark whisper in the wind. Or maybe a deep chill in the bone. Something. An ethereal song only Elizabeth or I could hear. A tightness in the air. Some textbook premonition. There are misfortunes we almost expect in life – what happened to my parents, for example – and then there are other dark moments, moments of sudden violence that alter everything. There was my life before the tragedy. There is my life now. The two have very little in common.”

— Harlan Coben

93. “Love your parents – while we are busy growing up, they are growing old.”

— Harlan Coben

94. “The hunchback sees the hump of others – never his own.”

— Harlan Coben

95. “That’s what a good crime novelist – any good novelist – should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.”

— Harlan Coben

96. “Some things we pack away, stick in the back of the closet, never expect to see again – but we can’t quite make ourselves discard them. Like dreams, I guess.”

— Harlan Coben

97. “The house had the stale smell of a grandparent. When you’re a kid, the smell gives you the creeps; when you’re an adult, you want to bottle it and let it out with a cup of cocoa on a bad day.”

— Harlan Coben

98. “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

99. “The media, an entity with the collective attention span of a Twinkie-filled two-year-old, immediately focused on this shiny new toy, kicking the old one under the bed. Carlson.”

— Harlan Coben

100. “My great-grandfather, Dad often told us, saved his best wines for special occasions. He was killed when the Nazis invaded Paris. The Nazis ended up drinking his wine. Lesson: you never wait. When I was growing up, we used only the good plates. We used the best linens. We drank out of Waterford crystal. When my father died, his wine cellar was nearly empty.”

— Harlan Coben