Explore Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.

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

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

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

You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.

Well, this is a story about books." About books?" About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind." You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel." That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

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.

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

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

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

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