Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.
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.
Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.
Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.
One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.
It’s curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don’t dare say to someone’s face.
Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.
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.
Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.
Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.
There are people you remember and people you dream of.
Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.
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.
You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That’s why you live longer.
Every labyrinth has its minotaur.
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.
A Gentleman’s agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.
There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.
The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.