Paulo Coelho: "Culture makes people understand each other better"

• "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".

Catrin Welz-Stein | Surrealist Digital painter

• "I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed".

• "Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering".

• "I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature".

• "Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience".

• "You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen".

• "Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure".

• "No, I never saw an angel, but it is irrelevant whether I saw one or not. I feel their presence around me".

• "Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream".

• "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".

Paulo Coelho de Souza, 1947 | Brazilian lyricist and novelist

• "Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows".

• "What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself".

• "My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul".

• "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".

• "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".

• "With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated".

• "I'm not a person that socializes very well".

• "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".

• "Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be".

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

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

• "The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love".

• "Every blessing ignored becomes a curse".

• "Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it's how you deal with your life, with your surroundings".

• "People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives but then you go to the internet and they're much more open".

• "MySpace is my wife... Facebook is my mistress".

• "Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony".

• "No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone's eyes".

• "One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving".

• "The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality - it connects you to reality".

• "What interests me in life is curiosity, challenges, the good fight with its victories and defeats".

• "Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere".

• "Beauty is the greatest seducer of man".

• "The gigantic tension before the shooting of an arrow, and the total relaxation seconds later, is my way of connecting to the universe".

• "We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life".

• "Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that".

• "When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream".

• "I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset - tears are words waiting to be written".

• "I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It's like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books".

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

• "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".

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

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

• "I'm not saying that love always takes you to heaven. Your life can become a nightmare. But that said, it is worth taking the risk".

• "If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards getting it".

• "Everything is possible, from angels to demons to economists and politicians".

• "Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world".

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

• "The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them".

• "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 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".

• "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".

• "There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this".

• "I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success".

• "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'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".

• "You should treat a muse like a fairy".

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

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

• "When someone leaves, it's because someone else is about to arrive".

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

• "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".

• "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".

• "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".

• "Let us be absolutely clear about one thing: we must not confuse humility with false modesty or servility".

• "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".

• "It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school".

• "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".

• "Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you. I always was a rich person because money's not related to happiness".

• "I don't try to control my days".

• "It's very difficult to read a book on your computer".

• "Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?"

• "I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money".

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

• "Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species".

• "At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss".

• "When you repeat a mistake, it is not a mistake anymore: it is a decision".

• "When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too".

• "Everyone is indeed crazy but the craziest are those who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to".

• "The boat is safer anchored at the port; but that’s not the aim of boats".

• "Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them".