Happy Birthday, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Ruiz Zafón, born 25 September 1964, is a Spanish writer, whose works have been published in 42 countries. 

Quotes on Books

1. 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 hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
2. Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.
3. 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.
4. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.
5. I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.
6. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.
7. 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 already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
8. There are worse things than a prison of words.
9. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn’t matter to anyone changed my life.
10. I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.