Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.... you've got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?

We create the illusions we need to go on.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.

This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can't.

The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

I do believe that reality is dreadful and that you are forced to choose it in the end or go crazy, but that it kills you.

We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.

I think it became blurry because I grew up in a very private family. I mixed privacy and secrecy up somewhere along the line. Everything became a secret, and I thought that was how you should live. Lying about everything. The mask I put on as a kid to survive was the funny lady. Then the funny person all of a sudden became harder to do without substances. Substances let me keep the mask on longer. Until it doesn't work anymore and you're just a mess.

Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.

We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

By and large... the good's an illusion, little fables folks tell themselves so they can get through their days without screaming too much.

Truth is not always the best basis for happiness. There are certain lies which may constitute a far better and more secure foundation of happiness. There are people who perish when their eyes are opened.

They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

When we're deluded there's a world to escape. When we're aware, there's nothing to escape.

Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it's a lie.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?