Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

You know, the media always tries to twist things and make things into what they're not.

Some people thought we were presenting Archie as a false character. President Nixon thought we were making a fool out of a good man.

I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

Selective truth

The enemy lies to make the problems we face appear larger than the solutions we carry.

Read between the lines, folks, 'cause I'm here to tell you you're not getting the straight story. Ever. You're getting variations of the truth, if you're lucky.

Misrepresentation, false propaganda, innuendoes soon sprout into poisonous weeds, and before long the people find themselves victims of a pollution that has robbed them of their individual liberty and enslaved them to a group of political gangsters.

A half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.

Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is - the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state, where it's done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom.

They kept the lie going, and the people loved it.

If you help manufacture an enemy that's really evil, you can point to the fact that it's really evil, and say, "Hey, it's really evil."

Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.

Where there's smoke, there's bound to be mirrors.

The false can never grow into truth by growing in power.

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

The best calumnies are spiced with truth.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

The fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him . . . He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

I've heard it said that God is in the details. It's the same with the truth. Leave out the details, the crucial heart, and you can damn someone with the bare bones of it.

Truth does not do as much good in the world as its imitations do harm.

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.