Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Shadow of the Wind is a novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, a Spanish novelist who worked across multiple fields and whose writing drew on both Spanish and Catalan.
Zafón was born in Barcelona on September 25, 1964, and educated at the Centre educatiu privat Jesuïtes Sarrià - Sant Ignasi before going on to study at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He worked as a journalist, publicist, screenwriter, and film screenwriter as well as a novelist. His other novels include The Prince of Mist, The Midnight Palace, Marina, and The Labyrinth of Spirits, and he received the Edebé Award of Children's and Youth Literature during his career.
Zafón received several awards, among them the Barry Award for Best First Novel, the Premios Protagonistas, the Crimezone Thriller Awards, and Humo's Gouden Bladwijzer. A citizen of Spain who had relocated to Los Angeles, he died there on June 19, 2020.
Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Carlos Ruiz Zafón's insights on:
Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption and gossip.
It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.
Making money isn't hard in itself. What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. It's a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections - and it's hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona.
The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain.
I'm fascinated by the period that goes from the Industrial Revolution to right after World War II. There's something about that period that's epic and tragic.
I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend – if possible, a deaf one.
I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn’t stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn’t notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.