Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.

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

Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has not acquired them through reason. It doesn't matter whether we are looking at God, race, or national pride.

... And what am I to do?""Well, that depends. Do you like the girl?""Like her? I don't know. How do you know if...?""It's very simple. Do you look at her furtively and feel like biting her?""Biting her?""On her backside, for example.

But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred.

All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.

I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil....

Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.

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

You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected.

And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.

As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.

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