Explore Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. It's a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections - and it's hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

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

The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

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.

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.

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.

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.

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'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

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

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

Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing them to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls?

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.

He didn't know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without quite knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay.

Childhood devotions make unfaithful and fickle lovers.

I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations.