Top 200 Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A good friend once told me that the problems are like cockroaches. If drawn to light, they’ll get scared.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

102. “Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

103. “Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it’s like electricity: you don’t need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

104. “God gives us life, but the world’s landlord is the devil...”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

105. “I hoped my absence made them happy or at least made them forget that they weren’t happy and never will be.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

106. “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.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

107. “Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

108. “Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist’s life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one’s limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

109. “Coincidences are the scars of fate.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

110. “Whenever it poured like this, Max felt as if time was pausing. It was like a cease-fire during which you could stop whatever you were doing and just stand by a window for hours, watching the performance, an endless curtain of tears falling from heaven.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

111. “In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

112. “Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing them to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls?”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

113. “To truly hate is an art one learns with time.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

114. “We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we’re awake.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

115. “Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

116. “Childhood devotions make unfaithful and fickle lovers.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

117. “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.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

118. “Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

119. “Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

120. “There are people you remember and people you dream of.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

121. “In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there’s a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone’s asleep, they go erasing the past. It’s like a bad Ray Bradbury story.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

123. “Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

124. “When ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ became a success I had already been a working writer, I’d been through the ups and downs, I’d seen how it worked.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

125. “Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

126. “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

127. “Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

128. “Never trust he who trusts everyone.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

129. “I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

130. “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 Zafón

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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

132. “If you think you’re the only person for whom life is painful, you’re wrong. And if you don’t mind letting yourself die like a dog, at least have the decency to remember that there are those of us who do care – although, to tell the truth, I don’t see why?”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

133. “My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don’t have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

134. “He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

135. “Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

136. “Leger, huwelijk, kerk en bankwezen: de vier ruiters van de apocalyps.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

137. “The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funneled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

138. “In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

139. “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.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

140. “We all give up great expectations along the way.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

141. “Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

143. “One mustn’t dream of one’s future; one must earn it.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

144. “People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don’t misunderstand me.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

145. “Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

146. “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.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

147. “Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

149. “It’s curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don’t dare say to someone’s face.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

150. “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?”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón