Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from.

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.

Sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

Old age is the lubricant of belief. When death knocks at the door, skepticism flies out the window. A serious cardiovascular fright and a person will even believe in Little Red Riding Hood.

None of us are what we once were.

You can come share a tasty meal of bread, raisins, and fresh cheese. With that, and The Count of Monte Cristo, anyone can live to a hundred.

Nunca te fíes de nadie, Daniel, especialmente de la gente a la que admiras. Ésos son los que te pegarán las peores puñaladas.

Disarmed, I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.

Contrary to what you believe, the earth does not revolve around the desires of your crotch.

Los regalos se hacen por el gusto del que regala, no por mérito del que recibe.

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

La televisión es el Anticristo y le digo yo que bastarán tres o cuatro generaciones para que la gente ya no sepa ni tirarse pedos por su cuenta y el ser humano vuelva a la caverna, a la barbarie medieval, y a estados de imbecilidad que ya superó la babosa allá por el pleistoceno. Este mundo no se morirá de una bomba atómica como dicen en los diarios, se morirá de risa, de banalidad, haciendo un chiste de todo, y además un chiste malo.

People with a meagre soul always try to make others feel small too.

Probablemente un extraño nos ve como somos, no como quiere creer que somos

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.

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.

Fools talk, cowards silence , wise men listen

El nivel de barbarie de una sociedad se mide por la distancia que intenta poner entre las mujeres y los libros.

This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...

He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...

I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.

vous avez poison au coeur

Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.

Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.