Quotes from 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.

I'm not very happy idle. There's always this voice in my head that says, 'I should be writing.'

If I don't write, I hate myself. Simple as that. My life is out of balance.

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.

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.

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

Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.

Man plans. God laughs.

This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.

You don't worry about happiness and fulfilment when you're starving.

Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.

I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.

Writing isn't about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.

When I was seventeen, I worked as a counsellor at a co-ed sleep-away camp for eight weeks. I loved it but it could be harrowing - it was far too much responsibility for someone my age.

When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.

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.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

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.

I'm not a big sports fan.

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

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

I'm a little bit of a control freak.

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.

The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea - wink, wink.