Top 300 Harlan Coben Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “The old saw about bad news traveling fast has never been truer than in the age of the Internet.”

— Harlan Coben

202. “I want to say something comforting, but I know that this is one of the moments when words would be like an appendix – superfluous or harmful.”

— Harlan Coben

203. “This is how detecting works. You keep going even if what you’re doing seems like a momentous waste of time and energy.”

— Harlan Coben

204. “They watched a repeat of Frasier on Channel 11. The show was starting to grow on them both.”

— Harlan Coben

205. “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

206. “I’d rather read than relax. I’d rather keep the mind engaged.”

— Harlan Coben

207. “The decor was nice in a fake-rustic, Martha Stewart sort of way. The furniture was what they called “simple country” where the look was indeed simple and the price outrageous. Lots of pines and wickers and antiques and dry flowers. The smell of potpourri was strong and cloying. They.”

— Harlan Coben

208. “I like to go out and write. So I’ll often go to a Starbucks or a local coffee bar, and I’ll sit there and I’ll write. I can write pretty much anywhere.”

— Harlan Coben

209. “Diamonte shook his head again. He reached down and put his hand on his right boot. Myron had seen him do this before. He liked to sort of pet the boot. Myron had no idea why. Maybe he found the feel of snakeskin soothing. Reminiscent of the womb.”

— Harlan Coben

210. “The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time. I don’t do too many notes. I keep it mostly in my head. I usually start writing a new book around January, and it’s due October 1.”

— Harlan Coben

211. “Check out the comments underneath,” Augie says. I move the cursor down. “There are over fifty thousand of them.” “Just click ‘Top Comments’ and read a few.” I do as he asks. And as always when reading a comments section, my faith in humanity plummets:.”

— Harlan Coben

212. “Captain Midnight is always careful.” “It’s not just Captain Midnight I’m worried about it. It’s his alter ego.” “And who might that be?” “My Love Muffin.” Myron grinned into the receiver. “Hey, Jess, did you know Joan Collins was on Batman?” “Of course,” Jessica said. “She played the Siren.” “Oh yeah? Well, who did Liberace play?”

— Harlan Coben

213. “Another pause. Cameras pirouetted. Myron looked around. All the lenses were aiming down from up high, glaring at him like hostile space aliens or lunchroom monitors.”

— Harlan Coben

214. “Terrific,” Simon said. “The psychos are on my side.”

— Harlan Coben

215. “Doctors kept stressing that mental disease was the same as physical disease. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. Maybe, to be more charitable, it was because you could hide a mental disease.”

— Harlan Coben

216. “Introductions were made. Hands were shaken. Rear ends were seated. As was his custom in such situations, Win remained silent. His eyes slid from one side of the room to the other, taking in everything. He liked to study people for a while before speaking to them, especially in their home environment.”

— Harlan Coben

217. “No, in the Bolitar household, the kitchen was more a gathering place – a Family Room Lite, if you will – than anything related to even the basest of the culinary arts. The round table held magazines and catalogs and congealing white boxes of Chinese takeout. The stove top saw less action than a Merchant-Ivory production. The oven was a prop, strictly for show, like a politician’s Bible.”

— Harlan Coben

218. “Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes.”

— Harlan Coben

219. “We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray.”

— Harlan Coben

220. “Few things, I assure you, will devastate like the might-have-beens.”

— Harlan Coben

221. “Esperanza said, “Some bottled blond with a bottled tan is down here to see you.”

— Harlan Coben

222. “The Bad Man isn’t lurking in playgrounds, kiddies. He lives in your house.”

— Harlan Coben

223. “They – bliss and fear – are constant companions. Rarely does one venture out without the other.”

— Harlan Coben

224. “Hoyt?” Hoyt turned back around. “So there’s no misunderstanding,” Carlson said. “I don’t believe a word you just said. We clear?” “Crystal,” Hoyt said.”

— Harlan Coben

225. “A man who had to be Detective Roland Dimonte answered the door. He was dressed in jeans, paisley green shirt, black leather vest. He also had on the ugliest pair of snakeskin boots – snow-white with flecks of purple – Myron had ever seen. His hair was greasy. Several strands were matted to his forehead like to flypaper. A toothpick – an actual toothpick – was jutting out of his mouth. His eyes were set deep in a pudgy face, like someone had stuck two brown pebbles in at the last minute. Myron.”

— Harlan Coben

226. “Someone is always worse off than you. That never seemed like much comfort.”

— Harlan Coben

227. “I said everyone looks happy. That was kinda my point. If you judge the world by Facebook, you wonder why so many people take Prozac.”

— Harlan Coben

228. “Myron sipped his coffee. Gourmet coffee. A year ago he never drank coffee. Then he started stopping into one of the new coffee bars that kept cropping up like bad movies on cable.”

— Harlan Coben

229. “So I’m not sure I follow. What makes you think he’s in danger?” “Nothing, I guess. The woman’s voice. I don’t know. It sounded so sickly sweet.” “Oh,” Broome said, “well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Megan frowned. “Could you be, I don’t know, a little more patronizing?” “‘Sickly sweet’?” “Okay, I get it.” “No, Cassie or whatever your name is, I don’t think you do.” Broome moved a little closer. “May I be blunt?” “Because so far you’ve been circumspect? Sure.”

— Harlan Coben

230. “You won’t believe it. I don’t believe it either. And yet I know what I know. I don’t believe in magic or superstition. But I believe that there are some things we cannot yet comprehend – that there are things beyond our capabilities to understand. Sometimes, explaining how the universe works is like teaching a lion to read. Reading is real. The lion is real. But he’s never going to read.” I.”

— Harlan Coben

231. “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

232. “Esperanza and Myron shared a yellow cab to the Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth. The cab smelled like a Turkish whorehouse, which was an improvement over most.”

— Harlan Coben

233. “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

234. “Dimonte spit into the can again, trying hard to cover up his obvious body language. “We’re still working on it.” “Uh, let’s pretend for a brief moment that I’m not a mentally dehydrated numb nut.”

— Harlan Coben

235. “His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell.”

— Harlan Coben

236. “When you’re young you don’t get how great it is to be loved unconditionally.”

— Harlan Coben

237. “You read me,” Myron said, “like Vasco da Gama reads a map.” Dimonte.”

— Harlan Coben

238. “You think I should tell Jeremy?” “I think first and foremost you should put aside your Batman complex,” she said. “What the hell does that mean?” “It means you always try a little too hard to be heroic.” “And that’s bad?” “Sometimes it clouds your thinking,” she said. “The heroic thing is not always the right thing.” “Jeremy already has a family. He has a mother and a father – ” “He has,” Esperanza interrupted, “a lie.” They.”

— Harlan Coben

239. “I don’t remember how big the balloons were. I was a kid then. Everything looks bigger when you’re a kid.”

— Harlan Coben

240. “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

241. “On the radio a rock group called the Motels were repeatedly singing the ingenious line Take the L out of lover, and it’s over. Deep. Literal, but still deep. The Motels. Whatever happened to them?”

— Harlan Coben

242. “Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.”

— Harlan Coben

243. “All around her, children and families played and laughed and reveled in the glory of this seemingly ordinary day. They did so without fear or care because they didn’t get it. They all played and they all laughed and they felt so damn safe. They didn’t see how fragile it all was.”

— Harlan Coben

244. “Right now, even though he’d been dead for years, she wanted to collapse in her father’s big arms and hear him tell her that everything would be all right. Do we ever outgrow that need?”

— Harlan Coben

245. “When I looked into her eyes, I could see forever.”

— Harlan Coben

246. “Some people are conduits for misery.”

— Harlan Coben

247. “There are two people in a tennis match. One ends up winning, one ends up losing. And I think the pleasure comes not from winning. I think the pleasure comes from beating someone.” She scrunched up her face like a very puzzled child. “Why is that something we admire? We call them winners, but when you think about it, they really get off on making someone else lose. Why is that something we admire so much?” “That’s.”

— Harlan Coben

248. “I blinked and the images were gone. But I remembered how the laugh and the howl and the splash would ripple and echo in the stillness of our lake, and I wondered if ripples and echoes like those ever fully die away, if somewhere in the woods my father’s joyful yelps still bounced quietly off the trees. Silly thought, but there you go.”

— Harlan Coben

249. “I’d always hated running. Born-again joggers described how they got addicted to the rapture of running, how they achieved a nirvana known as a runner’s high. Right. I’d always firmly believed that – much like the high of auto-asphyxiation – the bliss came more from a lack of oxygen to the brain than any sort of endorphin rush.”

— Harlan Coben

250. “Win looked at him. “Were you ever in the military?” he asked. Pants seemed confused. “No.” “You are a worthless punk,” Win said in the same tone he might use when discussing a mixed stock report. “A pitiful ectoplasm such as yourself wearing army fatigues is an affront to any man or woman who has ever experienced real combat. If I ever happen across you again donning any similar garb, I will hurt you severely. Do I make myself clear?”

— Harlan Coben