“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
More from Carlos Ruiz Zafón on Writing
“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”
“Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”
“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”
“Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Nora Roberts
6 quotes“I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”