Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes - Page 9

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

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.

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.

... deep down nobody is bad, only frightened.

A big success can be very confusing if it comes too early in your life. When you are young, you are more vulnerable to vanity. I was 36 when I wrote The Shadow of the Wind and the success of it was very gradual. If you have this kind of success straight off, I think there is a danger you can become an idiot, because you don't have a perspective. It hasn't changed me a lot. I fly first class now. But those things don't change you. If I am pretentious, I was before, I haven't changed. The only thing is, I am less anxious now.

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

I was very bored at school. I found it very easy and slow and grey. My teachers didn't really know how to handle me, because I was very sarcastic. I was over-confident, arrogant, a typical youngest child. I went through periods of withdrawing into myself and school psychologists tried to figure me out, work out why I didn't fit in. I found that irritating, too.

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

Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

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.

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

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.

Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.

One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.

It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to the moral ruin and confusion of the intellect.

A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.

In those days, Christmas still retained a certain aura of magic and mystery. The powdery light of winter, the hopeful expressions of people who lived among shadows and silence, lent that setting a slight air of promise in which at least children and those who had learned the art of forgetting could still believe.

Those were the words she wanted to hear and she finally surrendered to the temptation of believing them.

I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.

I prefer you like this, when you're in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.

In principle I'm an atheist, although in fact I have a lot of faith

Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.

[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.

While you're working, you don't have to look life in the eye.