Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

... And what am I to do?Well, that depends. Do you like the girl?Like her? I don't know. How do you know if...?It's very simple. Do you look at her furtively and feel like biting her?Biting her?On her backside, for example.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has not acquired them through reason. It doesn't matter whether we are looking at God, race, or national pride.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a short cut to the truth,’ replied Max.‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Inspiration comes when you stick your elbows on the table, your bottom on the chair and you start sweating. Choose a theme, an idea, and squeeze your brain until it hurts. That's called inspiration.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

History is biology's dumping ground

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their secret plan, even though we don't understand it.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Everyone wanted to see [him] fall so they could devour his remains. As is usually the case, the army of sycophants had turned into a horde of hungry hyenas

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

He let the hours go by lost in the magic of words, shedding his skin and his name, feeling like another person. He allowed himself to be carried away by the dreams of shadowy characters, the only refuge left for him.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

- Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she'd wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn't wanted to grant her.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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 it's a woman who's extremely vain.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón