Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.”

“Never trust he who trusts everyone.”

“In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.”

“He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.”

“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.”

“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”

“After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.”

“Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”

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

“There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”

“It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.”

“I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.”

“1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.”

“Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

“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.”

“Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.”

“Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.”

“future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.”

“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)”

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