Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.

Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.

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

It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.

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.

Coincidences are the scars of fate.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

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.

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.

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.

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