Sometimes even when the book is over I don’t know who’s good and who’s bad. It’s really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white. – Harlan Coben
I’m 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize: We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin. – Harlan Coben
The muse is not an angelic voice that sits on your shoulder and sings sweetly. The muse is the most annoying whine. The muse isn’t hard to find, just hard to like – she follows you everywhere, tapping you on the shoulder, demanding that you stop doing whatever else you might be doing and pay attention to her. – Harlan Coben
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
Writing is one of the few activities where quantity will inevitably make quality. The more you write, the better you’re going to get at it. – Harlan Coben
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
I never bought the excuse of not having time to write. If you really want to do it, you’re either going to find those hours or eventually decide not to be a writer. – Harlan Coben
You can’t have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front – or a happy without a sad. – Harlan Coben
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
The state of New Jersey is really two places – terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. It’s very romantic in that way, but a bit naive. I like to play with that in my work. – Harlan Coben
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
In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury. – Harlan Coben
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
Children learn much more from how you act than from what you tell them. There are times this worries me – we parents are rarely the role models we want to be. True for life. True for driving. – Harlan Coben
I love stories. When I’m writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we’re cavemen, we’re sitting around the fire, and I’m telling you stories. If I bore you, you’re probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head. – Harlan Coben
I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. – Harlan Coben
And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often – very last paragraph sometimes – I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different. – Harlan Coben
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
Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you’re looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need. – Harlan Coben