The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

I could tell you it’s the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.

I spend a lot of time in L.A., and when it rains there you get the entire rainfall for the year in two days, raindrops the size of mangoes. And in Barcelona, the Mediterranean storms...

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...

Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord’s Prayer.-A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type...

[He] was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes.

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.

Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.

Uno de los primeros recursos propios del escritor profesional que Isabella había aprendido de mí era el arte y la práctica de procrastinar. Todo veterano del oficio sabe que cualquier ocupación, desde afilar el lápiz...

I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of...

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...

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he’d spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library – hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams...

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

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for...

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

El vino convierte al sabio en necio, y al necio en sabio.

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

Don’t be bashful; we’re among gentlemen. It’s a known fact that we men are the missing link between the pirate and the pig.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors’....

Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he’d never lived.

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

The success of ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ made me very happy, but it did not change my perspective or the way I was.

The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn’t know where to put it.

It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the...

Las estadísticas lo demuestran: más gente muere en la cama que en la trinchera.

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which...

Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didn’t manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that...

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.

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...

that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

You don’t look well, he pronounced. – Indigestion, I replied. – From what? – Reality. – Join the queue.

Destiny doesn’t do home visits… you have to go for it yourself.

Yo había crecido en el convencimiento de que aquella lenta procesión de la posguerra, un mundo de quietud, miseria y rencores velados, era tan natural como el agua del grifo, y que aquella tristeza muda...

Me abrumó la soledad que desprendía su persona y, a un tiempo, creí ver en su interior un abismo infinito al que no podía evitar asomarme.

… 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...

Making money isn’t hard in itself,what’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to

He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.

He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot … He found himself flying among stars and planets …

Aryami Bose’s home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.

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’m fascinated by the period that goes from the Industrial Revolution to right after World War II. There’s something about that period that’s epic and tragic.

En aquellos días aprendí que nada da más miedo que un héroe que vive para contarlo, para contar lo que todos los que cayeron a su lado no podrán contar jamás.

Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like...

Ponoćna palača drugi je roman koji sam objavio, 1994., i tvori, zajedno s Princem magle, Rujanskim svjetlima i Marinom, seriju “mladenačkih” romana koje sam napisao prije Sjene vjetra. Iskreno, nikad baš nisam shvatio što znači...

1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.

In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years.

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