He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Juliรกn was living in the past, locked in his memories. Juliรกn lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonI quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonIn the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebodyโs best friend.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonIn 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 Zafon