Top 300 Harlan Coben Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I’m the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.”

— Harlan Coben

202. “War is never a meritocracy for the casualties.”

— Harlan Coben

203. “Some secret. Myron was still hoping to bump into someone above the equator who didn’t know about it.”

— Harlan Coben

204. “Man may be evil or good, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that man rarely considered the consequences of his actions. In short, man was often just plain stupid.”

— Harlan Coben

205. “He sounded genuine, but Myron knew that meant nothing. People were amazing liars.”

— Harlan Coben

206. “The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling – that you’d take on vacation and rather than going out, you’d read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that’s what readers are responding to.”

— Harlan Coben

207. “Hope she’s not getting Gloria.” “Why?” “She kinda looks like a white version of me,” Jake said. “Only with a heavier beard.”

— Harlan Coben

208. “He passed a hair salon called Snip Away, which sounded more like a vasectomy clinic than a beauty parlor.”

— Harlan Coben

209. “Purging was part of his grieving process –.”

— Harlan Coben

210. “One time Clu tried to explain it to me,” Enos continued. “‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to escape the world; sometimes you want to escape yourself.’ ” He cocked his head. “Do you believe that?” “Not really,” Myron said. “Like a lot of cute phrases, it sounds good. But it also sounds like a load of self-rationalization.”

— Harlan Coben

211. “When you can see the stakes, when you realize the true purpose of your mission, it motivates you. It makes you focus. It makes you push away the distractions. You gain clarity of purpose. You gain strength.”

— Harlan Coben

212. “I am, after all, a thriller writer. I routinely delve into the darkest chambers of the human heart. I’ve written about murder, kidnapping, depravity, horror, violence, and disfigurement.”

— Harlan Coben

213. “Myron remembered something his father once told him: People have an amazing capacity to mess up their own lives.”

— Harlan Coben

214. “The old saw about bad news traveling fast has never been truer than in the age of the Internet.”

— Harlan Coben

215. “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

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

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Harlan Coben

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “Intuition was often a way of cutting corners, a nifty technique of replacing hard evidence and facts with something far more elusive and capricious. The worst investigators Carlson knew relied on so-called intuition.”

— Harlan Coben

239. “Some people are conduits for misery.”

— Harlan Coben

240. “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

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

— Harlan Coben

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “I can be over in ten minutes.” “You’ll stay for dinner?” “Depends on what’s on the tape,” I say. “Right, yeah, that makes sense.” Ellie hears something in my voice and knows me too well. “Everything else okay?” “We’ll talk.” I hang up first.”

— Harlan Coben

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

— Harlan Coben

248. “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

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

— Harlan Coben

250. “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