Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho de Souzais a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. He is the recipient of numerous international awards, amongst them the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. His novel The Alchemist has been translated into 80 languages. The author has sold over 200 million copies worldwide and is the all-time bestselling Portuguese language author...
NationalityBrazilian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 August 1947
CityRio de Janeiro, Brazil
CountryBrazil
Walking helps me a lot to feel alive, and I do this every single day, my wife and I. We have long conversations about nature, and we also walk silently, just contemplating.
You have two types of writers: one like Proust who was locked in his room and wrote the masterpiece. And the other type was Hemingway who celebrated life and also wrote a masterpiece.
You need to change yourself. The moment that you change yourself it is a gigantic step. And this is what I do. The book is much more important than the writer.
I don't know if the books are making the world a much better place. I don't write with that objective. What I know is that I see my readers creating a critical mass so we can at least understand this world in a different way.
I write because I need to share my thoughts with the audience.
I don't make plans. I live my life on a daily basis.
For many years I was trying to find answers only through books but then I realized that basically, life is about experience and the thing that you have to do is experience life instead of only reading about it. Reading is very important, but it's not enough. After reading, you have to take some decisions in your hands and move forward and be the human being that you are, and then going and meeting people and work.
Every new book is a challenge. I could, of course, have stopped many years ago if it was only for money. But no, it is about building bridges among cultures, different cultures. When you want someone to understand something that is not forcefully in your culture, you use stories.
When I was 40, I wrote my first book, The Pilgrimage, and I said to myself, "why did it take so long for me to write this book?" Because my dream, since I was 10 years old, was to be a writer. I said, I have to revisit my life using a metaphor, and the metaphor was basically this boy that has a dream and has to go far away to realize that his dream is close to him.
For a writer you have to be interested in different cultures, different backgrounds. You are not there to write only about your village. You're there to show a bit of your village, but also to understand other villages.
I am living here and now. The blessing of my life is that I am totally concentrating on the present moment. And I want to be because there is nothing but the present moment.
To dream is not enough, you have to fulfill your dream.
Simplicity is the heart of everything. If you look to the desert, apparently the desert is very simple but it's full of life, it's full of hidden places and the beauty is that it looks simple but it's complex in the way that it expresses the soul of the world or God.
Since my childhood I learned that to understand the world we need to go further and take the risks of sailing in unknown seas.