Harlan Coben

What did they give you?

Well, my mom was the storyteller.

And she's the one who, I think she wanted to be a writer.

I never actually saw her writing, but she talked about being a writer a lot.

And at least, you know, my parents never saw any of my success, which is also something that haunts me.

But she's got to see at least that I started to write in the beginning.

And she had the imagination.

It was wild.

I think the work ethic that it takes to do it is probably more my dad.

And I think one of the things that's most underrated in a writer, and we talked about this the other day at the Queen's Reading Room, was the importance of critical thinking and being empathetic, being able to take all sides of a position.

When I'm a writer, I'm often defending positions that I find abhorrent or that I don't agree with because that's my characters do.

And I have to defend them or make the person believe them because that's part of what writing is.

It's not everybody has my viewpoint.

I mean, it's a phrase that people use, but what does that mean?

Yes, it's sort of Socratic myth.

In other words, when I was in college, I don't really know, though.

I mean, I know now if my professors were right-wing or left-wing.

What we would do at Amherst College, which was a wonderful small college in Amherst, Massachusetts, we had, to give you an idea, we had

I think 450 kids per grade.

And while I was there, I lived next door to David Foster Wallace, who wrote The Infinite Jest, and my fraternity brother was Dan Brown, who wrote Da Vinci Code.