Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

There is a world of difference between facts and the truth. You can have so many facts that you don't deal with the truth. You never get to the truth. You have the places where, the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how - blah blah. And never get to the human truth. The human truth is as elusive as the air. And as important as the air.

My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

For me, it doesn't matter whether it's a comedy, a Western or horror. As long as you've got a good story to tell, the genre almost doesn't matter. As an actor playing the role, it's all rooted in reality.

I notice a lot of younger artists have difficulty telling stories. They might have short stories where they express themselves well, but they don't really know how to tell stories with characters. That craft just passed them by.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.

I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.