Paulo Coelho Quotes

When you write an article about anything, trolls use the comments to attack. They feel frustrated – but haters are losers. It’s not good to feed this aspect. It’s more intelligent to be constructive.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

When I’m dancing, I’m not thinking about anything. I am here. I am totally there. You know? And the feeling is a sensation of being away from myself. My soul dances with the angels, and my body dances with my wife.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they deny somehow that God has a feminine face. However, if you go to the holy texts, you see there is this feminine presence.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

About the idea of a clash between cultures, between civilisations, I don’t believe in it. It’s something some political leaders tried to use, and that the media tried and are still trying to sell us, in order to simplify the world and their work.

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, even if I have had to pay a very high price – which has been the case most of the time.

I’m not a person that socializes very well.

Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I am a Catholic, not so committed to the church, but to the idea of the Virgin, the female face of God.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

Twitter is my bar. I sit at the counter and listen to the conversations, starting others, feeling the atmosphere.

I hate to be smart.

I don’t try to control my days.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

I never say I am a guru.

I am a Catholic.

MySpace is an addiction.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

In the United States, I am a great success, but I am not a celebrity.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I don’t go to parties in general.

I’m modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate with the whole world.

Everything for me is sacred, beginning with earth, but also going to things made by man.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

My readers – and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

Most of my young years were spent under the boots of the military.

This may sound a little bit idealistic, but when I go to my blog, my Facebook page, my Twitter account, I talk to different people from all over the world, and you see how it’s easy to establish a dialogue.

Once I found this possibility to use Twitter and Facebook and my blog to connect to my readers, I’m going to use it, to connect to them and to share thoughts that I cannot use in the book.

The only thing that relaxes me is archery. That’s why I have to have apartments with gardens.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

MySpace is my wife… Facebook is my mistress.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

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.

Physical elegance, which is what I am talking about here, comes from the body. This is no superficial matter, but rather the way that man found to honour the way he places his two feet on the ground.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.