Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces li...

Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth ...

Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he ...

Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinis...

The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures...

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for k...

Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history it is haunted by history. Y...

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing...

If you ever have a daughter—a blessing I wouldn't wish on anyone, because it's Murphy's Law that soo...

He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for...

Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she'd wanted to fi...

Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough

The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in m...

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity:...

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you.

You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is th...

Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.

1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.

Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective.

Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I w...

So what is it you're going to show me today?""A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show yo...

Now, back in the reality that always lies in wait among the shadows of the Ensanche quarter, the enc...

Everyone wanted to see [him] fall so they could devour his remains. As is usually the case, the army...

- Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was ...

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

that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.

This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the ...

[He] was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brillianc...

Some disappointments honor those who inspire them

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, ver...

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.

Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrou...

... And what am I to do?""Well, that depends. Do you like the girl?""Like her? I don't know. How do ...

History is biology's dumping ground

He truly was a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things and in something to ...

Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear.

Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone ...

Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame.

The night I met him [he] told me that, for some reason, life usually grants us what we are not looki...

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in whic...

Inspiration comes when you stick your elbows on the table, your bottom on the chair and you start sw...

The day I charge an unbeliever like you for the word of God will be the day I'm struck dead by light...

Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.

Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no ot...

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

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dre...

Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are no...

You don't look well," he pronounced."Indigestion," I replied."From what?""Reality.""Join the queue.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't sto...

I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.

Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord's Prayer.-A beautiful an...

Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has no...

As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the...

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

All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable pro...

Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

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

There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, be...

Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring someth...

I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them...

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. T...

He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening...

I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of...

A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical cap...

To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me a...

It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, y...

It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that...

We all give up great expectations along the way.

Every self-respecting act of persuasion must find appeal to curiosity, then to vanity, and lastly to...

A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical cap...

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the han...

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

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rot...

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

-Do you think it's dirty money?-All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.

Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only ficti...

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli assert...

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.

Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.

Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spec...

Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for pea...

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in...

Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not ...

If there is a god, or hundreds of them, I hope they will forgive me for the harm I may have inflicte...

There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. S...

As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood call...

And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the bl...

I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again li...