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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.
I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Waiting is the rust of the soul.
Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.
The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funneled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling.
That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightening echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven...Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by the lightning now bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury.
Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.
Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.
It is difficult to hate an idea. That requires a certain intellectual discipline and a slightly obsessive, sick mind. There aren’t too many of those. It’s much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group. . .anything.
It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.
There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.
Army, Marriage, the Church, and Baking: the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Fermin Romero de Torres - The Shadow of the Wind.
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.
Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations--a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return.
Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.
A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from.
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