Top 300 Harlan Coben Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Jared was her son and the “co-general manager” of the Yankees – co meaning shares the title with someone who knows what he’s doing because he got the job through nepotism.”

— Harlan Coben

102. “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

103. “I treat every student who walks through those doors the same because we are here to teach, if not political science, maybe a little something about critical thinking or even – gasp! – life. If students came to us fully formed and without insecurities, what would be the point?”

— Harlan Coben

104. “I still try to make the “next” book my “best” book. I want to grip and move you in unexpected ways.”

— Harlan Coben

105. “There was an awkwardness to him, a stoicism that most people, with their need for appearances and fake smiles, found off-putting. Shane couldn’t handle small talk or the excess bullshittery of modern society. When.”

— Harlan Coben

106. “They say it takes a long time to comprehend a tragedy. You’re numb. You can’t adequately accept the grim reality. Again, that’s not true. Not for me anyway.”

— Harlan Coben

107. “His smile did more than lack warmth. It was the most purely physical smile Myron had ever seen, a byproduct strictly of the brain giving specific orders to certain muscles. It touched no part of him but his lips. Myron.”

— Harlan Coben

108. “I try to stress to my children that buying something never leads to true happiness.”

— Harlan Coben

109. “But life changes people. It smothers that kind of larger-than-life woman. Time quiets them down. That firecracker girl you knew in high school – where is she now? It didn’t happen to men as much. Those boys often grew up to be masters of the universe. The super successful girls? They seemed to die of slow societal suffocation. So.”

— Harlan Coben

110. “Too often, show muscles meant useless muscles.”

— Harlan Coben

111. “Three days ago, I was a dedicated doctor sleepwalking through my own life. Since then, I had seen a ghost, gotten emails from the dead, had become a suspect in not one but two murders, was on the run from the law, had assaulted a police officer, and had enlisted the aid of a known dug dealer.”

— Harlan Coben

112. “Relationships are never fifty-fifty. Sometimes they are sixty-forty, sometimes eighty-twenty. You’ll be the eighty sometimes, you’ll be the twenty others. The key is to accept and be okay with that.”

— Harlan Coben

113. “Life, he suspected, hinges too often on chance. We all want to convince ourselves that it is about hard work and education and perseverance, but the truth is, life is much more about the fickle and the random. We don’t want to admit it, but we are controlled by luck, by timing, by fate.”

— Harlan Coben

114. “I don’t find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it’s a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.”

— Harlan Coben

115. “Most religious people don’t believe the dogma, Ash. We take from it what we want, we discard what we don’t. We form whatever narrative we like – kind God, vengeful God, active God, laid-back God, whatever. We just make sure we get something out of it. Maybe we get life everlasting while people we resent burn for eternity. Maybe we get something more concrete – money, a job, friends. You just change the narrative.”

— Harlan Coben

116. “Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.”

— Harlan Coben

117. “Suzze T just stopped by,” Myron said. Win nodded, jaw jutted. “I saw her on the way out.” “Did she look upset?” “Didn’t notice,” Win said, taking a seat. Then: “Her breasts were engorged.” Win. “She has a problem,” Myron said. Win leaned back, crossed his legs with his customary coiled ease. “Explain.”

— Harlan Coben

118. “We’re called New Jersey but we’re actually the suburbs of New York.”

— Harlan Coben

119. “Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is? Lily.”

— Harlan Coben

120. “The course was packed with silent fans, though fan didn’t exactly feel like the right word to Myron. Parishioners was a hell of a lot closer. There was a constant reverie on a golf course, a hushed, wide-eyed respect. Every time the ball was hit, the crowd release was nearly orgasmic.”

— Harlan Coben

121. “In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart.”

— Harlan Coben

122. “You’re not a hypocrite. You aim toward lofty heights. The fact that your arrow cannot always reach them does not make you a hypocrite.”

— Harlan Coben

123. “You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.”

— Harlan Coben

124. “There is silence, and then there is rural silence, silence you could feel and reach out and touch, silence with texture and distance.”

— Harlan Coben

125. “The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time.”

— Harlan Coben

126. “Children view their parents as both intrepid and omnipotent.”

— Harlan Coben

127. “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

128. “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

129. “We always seem to be on the eve of destruction. And we always seem to get through it.”

— Harlan Coben

130. “I’m a little bit of a control freak.”

— Harlan Coben

131. “The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered – shouldn’t the rest of us take notice? But no.”

— Harlan Coben

132. “The room did not go quiet like something out of an old Western where the sheriff pushes open the creaking door and sashays into the saloon. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the door needed to creak.”

— Harlan Coben

133. “Chloe barked at a movement in the bush. A squirrel sprinted across the street. Chloe growled and feigned a chase. The squirrel stopped and turned back toward us. Chloe barked a boy-you’re-lucky-I’m-on-a-leash sound. She didn’t mean it. Chloe was a pure thoroughbred wimp. Kiss.”

— Harlan Coben

134. “They needed some Jews or gays or something to spice things up, to add a bit of theater and a couple of interesting bistros.”

— Harlan Coben

135. “Relationships and marriages are hard enough, but you add war into the mix and small fissures become gaping wounds. No one sees what you’re seeing – again that clear-eyed, unbiased thing – except your fellow soldiers. It’s like one of those movies where only the hero can see the ghosts and everyone else thinks the hero is crazy. In.”

— Harlan Coben

136. “Some people are drawn to trouble. Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up.”

— Harlan Coben

137. “You want people lined up, Will. You want the good guys on one side, the bad on the other. It doesn’t work that way, does it? It is never that simple. Love, for example, leads to hate. I think that was what started it all. Primitive love.”

— Harlan Coben

138. “I can only be as happy as my saddest child. Do.”

— Harlan Coben

139. “Obsession does not seek out problems and correct them; it manufactures them out of nothing, feeds them, makes them stronger.”

— Harlan Coben

140. “The secret in any interview was the ability to not fill the silence. A few seconds passed.”

— Harlan Coben

141. “There are virtually no major life decisions you make that are not in some way based on your finances.”

— Harlan Coben

142. “The name of the group was Survivor,” Win said. “Ironic name when you think of how quickly they vanished, no?”

— Harlan Coben

143. “A dancer on break approached him. She smiled. Each tooth was angled in a different direction, as if her mouth were the masterwork of a mad orthodontist. “Hi,” she said. “Hi.” “You’re really cute.” “I don’t have any money.” She spun and walked away. Ah, romance.”

— Harlan Coben

144. “Secrets... were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk.”

— Harlan Coben

145. “As a soldier, you don’t stand at attention because it looks nice. You stand at attention because, on some level, it either gives you strength or, just as important, makes you appear stronger to both your comrades and enemies.”

— Harlan Coben

146. “There are other single parents in town, mostly divorced mothers, but I get a ton of slack. If I forget to write a note or pick up my daughter late or leave her lunch on the counter, the other mothers or the staff in the school office chip in and help. They think my male helplessness is cute. When a single mother does any of those things, she is neglectful and on the receiving end of the superior moms’ scorn.”

— Harlan Coben

147. “I turned to Otto. “Why the hell did you hit him like that?” Otto looked back at me with eyes that sent a chill straight through my heart. They were lifeless eyes, not the slightest hint of light behind them. It was as though I were looking into the eyes of an inanimate object – the eyes of an end table, maybe, or a cardboard box. From.”

— Harlan Coben

148. “When he finished telling her about the kidnapping, Esperanza’s first words were an incredulous, “Win has a mother?” “Yep.” Pause. “There goes my spawned-from-a-satanic-egg theory.”

— Harlan Coben

149. “His voice not only dripped sarcasm but seemed to have spent days marinated in it: “How noble.” “Objection!”

— Harlan Coben

150. “They’re politicians,’ Win said. ‘They’d lie and evade if you asked them what they had for breakfast.”

— Harlan Coben