Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

I don't regard television as the outside world. I regard it as an artefact.

A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?

Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire likened life to a game of cards. Players must accept the cards dealt to them. However, once they have those cards in hand, they alone choose how they will play them. They decide what risks and actions to take.

People have to make their own decisions about their lives.

Short of throwing away all television sets, I really don't know what we can do about writing.

You are not here to try to get the world to be just as you want it. You are here to create the world around you that you choose.

Fundamentally, we are a product of choice, not nature (genes) or nurture (upbringing, environment).

Man must choose his world

...that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything - that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it - and its choice to be there - are gone.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

The power to affect your future lies within your own hands.

But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.

Man needs to choose, not just accept, his destiny.

There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.

My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.

I like a world where each of us has the tools to be able to make able to make our own decisions.

The power of choice. You have it. But you forfeit it when you imagine that you can choose for others. You can't. But you can choose for yourself.

Might have a couple of kinks to work through," Hale admitted then reached for her hand. As soon as he touched her, Kat knew there was no such thing as curses. People make and break their own fortunes--they are the masters of their own fate. And right then Kat wouldn't have changed a thing.

An American has invented a remote control that will turn off any telly within a 20ft radius. What a marvellous device! What a splendid invention! What a really helpful and improving way of devoting your time to building something that turns off culture. Next week, I'm instigating Burn a Book Week, to encourage even more conversation. I've come up with a fantastic little device which I'll call a box of matches.

Destiny planned out, I don't need no hand out.

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.

God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us.

You play a part in every aspect of your life going the way you want or not going the way that you want. It has very little to do with other people.

He who falls, falls by his own will, and he who stands, stands by God's will.

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices.