Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

I think once you sort of cross over and you realize what books can be - and if they mean something to you - there's just no stopping you.

I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

My first book was the book that changed my life.

I was an insecure kid. Once I saw 'Hercules' with Steve Reeves, it completely changed my life. If I had never gone to that film, I wouldn't be here today.

I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.

Writing gave me a life.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

When books are opened, we discover that we have wings

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

I've had experiences in my life where I've met certain people that have opened up something in me and given me hope and a new outlook on life.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

[Writing] totally changed my life. It gave me my life. Everything opened up.

I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enable you to live.

My life has been more influenced by books than by any other one thing.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

I turned my pain into art and my hard work into a career. Helping myself has helped others. helping others has helped me.

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was.

I did not go through the Book. The Book went through me.

Past and present, it is all the same, books are necromancers, they exercise an influence more varied, more lasting, than any magic known to man.