Top 200 Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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 for the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter’s night.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

152. “Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog’s tail.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

153. “Blaming TV as an abstract entity is nonsensical. It’s our hand on the remote. There’s a world out there outside the tube.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

154. “Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

155. “It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

156. “As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

157. “It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

158. “You’re as white as a nun’s buttock. Are you all right?”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

159. “I’m not talking to anyone, I’m delivering a monologue. It’s the inebriated man’s prerogative.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

160. “I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

161. “Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

162. “Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

163. “Everything in life in nonsense. it’s just a question of persepctive.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

164. “I’ve always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don’t have a brain.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

165. “I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

166. “One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

167. “Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

168. “I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I’m the stranger.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

169. “You don’t win a game by hitting the ball out of the court.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

170. “The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

171. “We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

172. “In principle I’m an atheist, although in fact I have a lot of faith.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

173. “Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

174. “They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

175. “It’s only worth staying in bed if you’re young and in good company.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

176. “In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

177. “A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

178. “Sometimes feeling and thinking are one and the same.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

179. “You young people never say anything. And us old folks don’t know how to stop talking.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

180. “The world’s very small when you don’t have anywhere to go.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

181. “Books hold no passports. There’s only one true literary tradition: the human.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

182. “Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

183. “One never forgets faces one wholeheartedly detests.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

184. “I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

185. “Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

186. “The wider the author’s arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

187. “In fact I don’t think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you’re born is simply an accident of fate. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn’t born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There’s only one true literary tradition: the human.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

188. “Human beings believe just as they breathe – in order to survive.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

189. “Few things are more deceptive than memories.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

190. “Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

191. “I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

192. “In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

193. “That’s what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they’ve been bastards too.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

194. “Viviamo nel ricordo di chi ci ama.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

195. “If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

196. “Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

197. “Madmen always think it’s the others who are mad.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

198. “Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

199. “I prefer you like this, when you’re in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

200. “Those were the words she wanted to hear and she finally surrendered to the temptation of believing them.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón