Carlos Ruiz Zafon

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

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

I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

I've always ignored the labels people put on things.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.

Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.

If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

There are times and places where not to be anyone is more honourable than to be someone.

The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.