Top 296 Quotes & Sayings by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Page 3

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

Envy is the religion of the mediocre

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

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.

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.

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

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

Memories are worse than bullets.

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.

A piece of literature can be many things but first of all it must capture its audience. You need to seduce people, entice them into a world of beauty and horror, light and shadow, of passion, of romance, of mystery. That's the magic of it. Beyond that, of course, you can open a dialogue about the ideas which interest you, but first of all you absolutely must get inside people's minds.

It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.

The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed on another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach.

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

If you think you’re the only person for whom life is painful, you’re wrong. And if you don’t mind letting yourself die like a dog, at least have the decency to remember that there are those of us who do care – although, to tell the truth, I don’t see why?

I don't care what happens in 100 years. I won't be around.

Once you lost all hope, time began to go faster and the senseless days deadened your soul.

somethings can only be seen in the shadows

Theory is the practice of the impotent.

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.

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.

We had yet to learn that the Devil created youth so that we could make our mistakes, and that God established maturity and old age so that we could pay for them.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.

Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.

I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.

The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.

The truth is what hurts

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.

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.

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.

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.

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.

... deep down nobody is bad, only frightened.

The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

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.

Once I'd worked out that I couldn't possibly expect people to enjoy a monstrous, 3000-page book, I realised I could in fact create a labyrinth of a story with four different points of entry. But what interested me was creating something that would rearrange itself every time you read one of the other books. So depending on which order you read them, the implications and angles would change. To get that right, each one of the books had to have its own personality and texture -- even though they are connected, they are very different creatures.

The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.

We all give up great expectations along the way.

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

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

There are worse prisons than words.

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.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.

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

The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.

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.

That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.

Thunder and lightning, it's like the end of the world.

I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.

Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.

All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind

Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face.

It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.

People only disappear when they have somewhere to go

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.

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.

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

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.