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...