CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON QUOTES
Spanish novelist (1964- )
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.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Prisoner of Heaven
Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
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.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
I don't believe in the supernatural, but I think it provides excellent material for literary purposes. Ghost stories are great tools to explore symbolic and atavistic elements in a narrative. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Henry James used ghosts and phantasmagoric trappings in order to add layers of meaning and effectiveness to their stories. At the end of the day, it is all fiction, poetry, and magic. Real curses, however, don't dwell in dark basements but in our hearts and conscience. We make our own moral choices, sometimes far spookier than any horror tale, and the terrors of this world are far too real and ordinary.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
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.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Interview: Carlos Ruiz Zafon", The Scotsman, Jun. 13, 2010
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Memories are worse than bullets.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"A Gothic favorite comes stateside", Book Page
Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it. In Los Angeles, it is quite the opposite: it is an older city than it might seem to be, but you don't perceive this -- every day you get out of your home, you are driving somewhere and sometimes you get this impression that everything was put there the night before.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Interview: Carlos Ruiz Zafon", The Sydney Morning Herald, Jun. 23, 2012
Coincidences are the scars of fate.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
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.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
We are puppets of our subconscious desires.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
With women the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter's night.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"The Shadow Maker", The Telegraph, Nov. 27, 2005
Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Carlos Ruiz Zafon's love letter to literature", New Zealand Listener, Mar. 14, 2013
It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind