Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotations

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond.

The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And its a woman whos extremely vain.

Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it. In Los Angeles, it is quite the opposite: it is an older city than it might seem to be, but you don't perceive this -- every day you get out of your home, you are driving somewhere and sometimes you get this impression that everything was put there the night before.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. Its a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections - and its hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

There are two things that I cannot live without: music and books. Caffeine isn't dignified enough to qualify.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.

The success of 'The Shadow of the Wind' made me very happy, but it did not change my perspective or the way I was.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

I am a curious creature and put my finger in as many cakes as I can: history, film, technology, etc. I'm also a freak for urban history, particularly Barcelona, Paris and New York. I know more weird stuff about 19th-century Manhattan than is probably healthy.

I'm fascinated by the period that goes from the Industrial Revolution to right after World War II. There's something about that period that's epic and tragic. There's a point after the industrial period where it seems like humanity's finally going to make it right. There were advances in medicine and technology and education. People are going to be able to live longer lives; literacy is starting to spread. It seemed like finally, after centuries of toiling and misery, that humanity was going to get to a better stage. And then what happens is precisely the contrary. Humanity betrays itself.

I'm a voracious reader, and I like to explore all sorts of writing without prejudice and without paying any attention to labels, conventions or silly critical fads.

I've always ignored the labels people put on things.

With 'The Angel's Game', there was a lot of pressure from the expectations - expectations from the book industry and from readers; it's natural.

In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.

A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.

I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.

I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.

Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.

Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.

A good father. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father, but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.

How many lost souls do You need, Lord, to satisfy Your hunger? the hatter asked. God, in His infinite silence, looked at him without blinking.

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.

One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.

I prefer you like this, when you're in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

With women, the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman for the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter's night.

Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.

I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.

Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.

It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to the moral ruin and confusion of the intellect.

I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.

Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.

Write," he said. "I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian. "No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope.

Not evil. Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f***ing up ... anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or ... leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.

The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today ...

There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.

Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.

Everything in life in nonsense. it's just a question of persepctive

The truth is what hurts

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.

There are people you remember and people you dream of.

Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.

You don't win a game by hitting the ball out of the court.

A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.

Contrary to what you believe, the earth does not revolve around the desires of your crotch.

The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population," he would remark. "And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there's no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.

Every labyrinth has its minotaur

He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...

Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?... Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?

You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Well, this is a story about books." About books?" About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind." You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel." That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.

In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.

Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.

It’s a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil....

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.

This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.

Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.

Whenever it poured like this, Max felt as if time was pausing. It was like a cease-fire during which you could stop whatever you were doing and just stand by a window for hours, watching the performance, an endless curtain of tears falling from heaven.

There are worse prisons than words.

I hoped my absence made them happy or at least made them forget that they weren't happy and never will be.

I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.

Theory is the practice of the impotent.