Carlos Ruiz Zafon
It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.Collection: Destiny
Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.Collection: Book
Memories are worse than bullets.Collection: Memories
The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.Collection: Want
Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Fall
Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.Collection: Compassion
In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.Collection: Boredom
Theory is the practice of the impotent.Collection: Practice
Envy is the religion of the mediocreCollection: Envy
I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.Collection: Doctors
It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.Collection: Bed
I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.Collection: Hands
And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.Collection: Stupid
You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.Collection: Book
I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.Collection: Writing
There are worse prisons than words.Collection: Prison
Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.Collection: Men
People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don't misunderstand me.Collection: Women
She wore an ivory-white dress and held the world in her eyes. I barely remember the priest's words or the faces of the guests, full of hope, who filled the church on that March morning. All that remains in my memory is the touch of her lips and, when I half opened my eyes, the secret oath I carried with me and would remember all the days of my life.Collection: Morning
People only disappear when they have somewhere to goCollection: People
God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil.Collection: Giving
I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.Collection: Swim
If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face.Collection: Hurt
The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.Collection: Nurse
Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.Collection: Blood
The truth is what hurtsCollection: Hurt
She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.Collection: Shining
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.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Football
The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Sweet
The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.Collection: Mind
Thunder and lightning, it's like the end of the world.Collection: Lightning
I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.Collection: Order
That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.Collection: People
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.Collection: Memories
Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.Collection: Doe
The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.Collection: Looks
I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.Collection: Writing
I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.Collection: Men
All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.Collection: Kids
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.Collection: Fall
Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.Collection: Los Angeles
You know, not every good book needs to be a movie, or a television series, or a video game. There's great work in those mediums, of course, but sometimes a book should remain a book. I still believe nothing tells a story with the richness and complexity of a good novel. When people say they think a book would make a good movie, they say this sometimes because, if it worked, they already saw all the images in the movie theatre that is in their brains. And sometimes that is the way it should stay.Collection: Book
... deep down nobody is bad, only frightened.Collection: Frightened
I am a night creature, and I write from midnight till dawn, secluded in my office and surrounded by my collection of dragons (I have 400 of them). I only use Macintosh computers, which I name in dynastic order. Right now I'm using MacDragon 5. Only the devil is able to decipher my handwriting.Collection: Writing
He didn't know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without quite knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay.Collection: Knowing
In those days, Christmas still retained a certain aura of magic and mystery. The powdery light of winter, the hopeful expressions of people who lived among shadows and silence, lent that setting a slight air of promise in which at least children and those who had learned the art of forgetting could still believe.Collection: Art