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
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.
I only can write a book every two years, you know. And I write very fast, but I'm not always writing every day. I needed a contact with different things, like nature, for example. I cannot be in front of a computer trying to tell a story.
Thousands of years ago, weren't we capable of building enormous structures like the pyramids? Weren't we capable of worshiping gods, weaving, making fire, finding lovers and wives, sending written messages? Of course we were. But although we've succeeded in replacing slaves with wage slaves, all the advances we've made have been in the field of science. Human beings are still asking the same questions as their ancestors. In short, they haven't evolved at all.
And with the passing years, what had once seemed like a miracle or the luckiest of chances and which he had always promised himself he would never become enslaved by, has gradually become his sole reason to go on living.
They spent days, nights, weeks, and years talking, never accepting the fact that, good or bad, an idea only exists when someone tries to put it into practice.
There are no risk in Love, as you'll find out for yourself. People have been searching for and finding each other for thousands of years. Suddenly, he realised that the might be wrong. There was always a risk, a single risk: that one person might meet with more thatn one Soulmate in the same incarnation...
As she had been walking from the ward to that room, she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings to surface, feelings that had been repressed for years in her soul. She had actually FELT them, and they were no longer necessary, they could leave.
And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories.
Most of my young years were spent under the boots of the military.
I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.
I have spent every New Year's Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It's a place with meaning for me.
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.