I looked at the group of human remains that languished in the corner and smiled at them. It occurred to me that their very presence was testimony to the moral emptiness of the universe and...

Ya sé que el mundo cambia, pero nunca en lo esencial.

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

Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was going to say that they didn’t improve with age but didn’t want to spoil her illusions.

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...

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...

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

Don’t be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.

Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she’d wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn’t wanted to grant her.

Su idioma eran las texturas y los ecos, el color de las voces, el ritmo de los pasos.

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...

An intellectual is some one who isn’t exactly distinguished by his intellect. He claims that label to compensates for his inadequacies.

Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.

Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn’t stop to think or reason.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we carry inside us, that when we read, we...

—Lo difícil no es ganar dinero sin más —se lamentaba—. Lo difícil es ganarlo haciendo algo a lo que valga la pena dedicarle la vida.

Man’s meanness is a fuse in search of a flame.

De niño aprendí a conciliar el sueño mientras le explicaba a mi madre en la penumbra de mi habitación las incidencias de la jornada, mis andanzas en el colegio, lo que había aprendido aquel día…...

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.

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

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to...

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

A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity – or none at all – with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it.

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

I’ve always ignored the labels people put on things.

Llevamos el circo en la sangre.

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

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war…. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a...

Ustedes, las mujeres, escuchan más al corazón y menos a la tontería —concluyó el sombrerero con tristeza—. Por eso viven más.

Marina me dijo una vez que sólo recordamos lo que nunca sucedió.

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as...

He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with...

Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don’t see what’s going on around...

The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It’s only natural, and you will have to find the...

I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.

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.

Milyen érdekes, hogy az ember oly könnyen kiönti a szívét egy darab papírnak, miközben szemtől szemben megszólalni sem mer.

There is nothing in the path of life that we don’t already know before we start. Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.

There are two things that I cannot live without: music and books. Caffeine isn’t dignified enough to qualify.

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

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses...

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

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

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

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

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands...

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...

We all give up great expectations along the way.

Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.