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
Waking up each morning to a hysterical alarm clock on the bedside table.
Getting married, having children, and staying together long after all love has died, saying that it's for the good of the children (who are, apparently, deaf to the constant rows).
Believing that your parents are always right.
Never talking to strangers. Saying nasty things about the neighbors.
Comparing objects like cars, houses, clothes, and defining life according to those comparisons, instead of trying to discover the real reason for being alive.
Making fun of anyone who seeks happiness rather than money and accusing them of "lacking ambition."
Believing that power is much more important than money and that money is much more important than happiness.
Retiring and discovering that you no longer have enough energy to enjoy life and dying a few years out of sheer boredom.
Working from nine till five every day at something that gives you no pleasure just so that, after thirty years, you can retire.
Spending years studying at university only to find out at the end of it all that you're unemployable.
Setting out rules for waging war (the Geneva Convention).
Anything that makes us forget who we are and what we want; that way we can work in order to produce, reproduce, and earn money.
I believe everything is one thing only. That said, there are some questions in my life that I don't know.. I've stopped asking. At the very beginning of my life, I wanted to have answers for everything. And now I respect the fact that I can't have answers for everything.
So for the question I go to the mystery of it and say I don't know. I only know that I am alive and there is something that manifests in my life, that it is God and one day I am going to understand my life, probably in the day that I die, or afterwards. But I try to find good questions and not good answers.