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COEHLO: So, the first time that I was in San Francisco it was during the beginning of the seventies. As a hippie, I was crossing America -- Well, I begin with two hundred dollars in my pocket, and I arrive in Mexico city with one hundred dollar left, so... it was quite a fantastic experience because at that time I didn't speak English at all. But there was a solidarity among young people that, well, helped me cross this country and go that far. So, that was it.

CAPEN: So, when did you start writing, and what motivated you to become a writer?

COEHLO: Well, my dream was always to become a writer, but when I went to my mother to tell her that I would like to write books and become a writer, she said, "Well, of course you can do this, but first you enroll yourself in the law school, become a lawyer, and then (laughs) you'll be able to write in your spare time. Which I did, of course, because sometimes you feel very insecure about the future. But it was then that the hippie generation arrived, and give me strength to quit everything, to quit the law school and started to pursue my dream -- to follow my dream. But I didn't yet write books until 1986 when I wrote my first book, that is currently published here as The Pilgrimage. After that, that time, I was writing, you know, for television, for newspapers, and even lyrics for rock songs that are very popular in Brazil. But The Pilgrimage, my first book, I wrote when I was I was almost thirty-eight years old. I'm now forty-eight.

CAPEN: What is it that moves you to write? What inspires you? What are the -- what are you trying to get at in your writing?

COEHLO: In a certain way I try to share with my readers my inner quest, that's basically my spiritual quest. I don't have anything to teach, I don't have anything to explain about the universe, I don't believe in explanations of the universe, but actually I do have something to share. It is how I am experiencing this strange and sometimes very trickery path. So, in all my books, The Pilgrimage is my journey to Santiago del Compostella. I walked from France to Spain during fifty-six days. It is my journey in that sacred road, and very ancient one.

The Alchemist is about -- well, it is a fable about the necessity we have to follow our dreams, and now The Valkyries, where I try to share my experience of being in the Mojave Desert with my wife for forty days. What surprised me the most is that this book became a worldwide success -- I sold nearly ten million copies of all of them, of course, and some that are not yet translated into English. There, by sharing something, I realized that I'm not alone, that there is a lot of people that share with me the same preoccupations, the same ideas, the same ideals, and the same quest for a meaning for this life.

CAPEN: Do you think there's a void along those lines, in this world, of some sort of spiritual connection?

COEHLO: I think that we are starting to get much more conscious about, you know, the importance of the spiritual path, and we are fulfilling it by paying attention to ourselves, by paying attention to, well, the connection that we have every single day with the soul of the world. We have this language of the omens, the language of the signs. It is an alphabet that is directed to us. If we do not fear to commit mistakes, if we take the omens as a warning, as a help to cross that particular day, then we start to get deeper and deeper into the soul of the world. Well, to find, not the meaning of life because I believe in mysteries, I believe that there is a mystery that goes far beyond our understanding. But at least to know that there is something for us to do here and we have to do.

CAPEN: So there is this other world that people really need to try and pay attention to, other than this mundane world we have in front of us: too many hours of work a day, too many responsibilities, too many entanglements in most people's lives. But, did it ever occur to -- I mean, your book is wildly popular, The Alchemist is just unbelievably popular around the world. But, did it ever occur to you that if everybody started paying attention to these things, to this other world, that homes would break apart, and families would break-up, and people would lose their jobs by the tens of thousands if they pursued this sort of quest?

COEHLO: Uh, yes! They will lose their jobs, they will start to having problems, but it is the only choice because in any case you have to pay a price for your dreams. On the other hand, I would not separate the mundane world and the spiritual one, because as far as alchemy goes, this is the art of projecting into this world, and to the material world, all our spiritual quests, so we have to mix this instead of separating it, and leading a life that is not connected with the spirituality. What I expect is that we will be brave enough to quit jobs, and to break some pacts, and then, after difficult times, we will realize that there is a meaning and that the universe has in fact has conspired to put all the pieces of this puzzle together by giving us, you know, a clue to follow our destiny. But don't expect that this will be a very, you know easy, road. It is a road that has all the problems as the road of someone who is not following his or her dreams. However, the price for a jacket that suits you, it is the same price of a jacket that is horrible and doesn't suit you, or is a size bigger than your own. So, well we must be prepared to pay the price, then any difficulty will make sense. On the other hand, if you do not follow your dreams, a difficulty is just a difficulty, it is just a difficult moment, and doesn't make any sense.

CAPEN: So without -- there are probably very few people who have not read The Alchemist yet, but without giving the ending away, this boy goes on a spiritual quest. You certainly deliver this story with beautiful wit and humor, and call for a great deal of courage along that path as well, but there's a funny twist at the end which really resolves the whole thing. I don't know if we can really discuss it without giving this away, you know. But you have to go through this sort of gauntlet, these rigors, and yet you end up in a place which probably you would not expect to end up in.

COEHLO: Exactly! But, even if everything that you need is near you, you should go forward to find that, because there is no shortcuts. I mean, the keys of the chapel -- boy, I also don't want to discuss the end of the book because it is a very interesting one -- but, in any case this shepherd boy, that we are all this shepherd boy, he has to leave the things that he is used to, and then, by traveling, he starts to discover a new being inside himself. He start to discover his own capacity and possibilities, but there were no other way, because then he's detaching himself from the routine. I'm not saying that you cannot discover the universe in a daily life basis of repeating the same, you know, job -- you can do this. You can do this, but you can now get blind by seeing each day as a similiar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It's just a matter to pay attention to this miracle. So, if we do this we will succeed in discover the clues of our destiny, even if we do the most boring, you know, task every single morning.

CAPEN: Paulo, your new book, The Valkyries, is this something of a continuation of The Alchemist?

COEHLO: No. In fact, The Valkyries and The Pilgimage, they are nonfiction books. They are, I am experiencing my path. So, I always propose tasks to myself and I try to fulfill them. To also avoid, because as anybody else, I have this tendency to getting used to, well, to everything. So, once in a while I propose to myself different tasks and The Valkyries is my experience with my wife into the desert, into the Mojave Desert. We went there to, well, to have a spiritual contact with angels in 1988, and I tried not only to show the task itself, but also, oh, the complexities inside someone who is trying to following in his spiritual path. I mean because the clue is not the Valkyrie, we have problems, we are sometimes not as good as we should be. But even though, this cannot keep us away from the spiritual path. We have to accept ourselves as we are and stop worrying, instead of trying to become perfect and then start working. So, I myself I have a lot of things that, well, can be barely described as not, you know, typical politically correct type, but even though, I'm not ashamed to follow this path and I know that in a certain way God is understanding of what I am doing. This is very important for me. Because we have to pay attention to this, we have to know that, as I said before, that someone is watching even if we don't understand what we are doing, we are doing something very meaningful.

CAPEN: It's safe to say that at times that maybe God is the only one who is understanding what you're doing and the path that makes sense to you.

COEHLO: Yes. Even if we do not (laughs) understand that he is understanding! If we do not realize that he is paying attention to us, but most of all it is he/she who controls the meaning of the soul of the world. If he's there, if he/she's there, well everything starts to have a meaning. So, also not to be ashamed to pray and to ask for help that can come from heaven. Sometimes we try to behave very much like adults, and we do not understand that, it's just like Jesus Christ said once, that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children. So we have to be children ourselves in order to be be amazed by the experience of a day of the sunshine, of the nighttime, of the moon. So we -- by being children, we can go into the experience of life.

CAPEN: Do you think eventually that might hurt corporate profits, Paulo?

COEHLO: (Laughs.) Yeah. Yes. But, uh -- that's -- (Laughs again.)

CAPEN: Do you have a favorite part of The Alchemist? Is there one passage or section that is -- that means so much to you?

COEHLO: Yes, there was a moment when I was writing The Alchemist that I thought I had been trapped in the writing because, in fact, I wrote The Alchemist in fifteen days. Not fifteen days, but thirty-nine years and fifteen days. Picasso probably was poor. (Laughs.) And there was a moment in The Alchemist when the boy has to change himself into the wind, and when I reached that moment, I thought, I don't know how to end this part of the book. But, in fact, the book wrote itself, and I had it. So I think, for me, this is not a favorite part, but I remember it as clear as the day that it was -- the most difficult moment in writing it and that the universe conspired to help me.

CAPEN: Would you like to read from the book?

COEHLO: So, at that moment in the book the boy's there and he's challenged to transform himself into the wind. He starts -- the book The Alhemist, is not -- is very realistic, besides that part. And the boy starts to try to relate himself with the Nature, and then, I will read:

The boy looked out at the horizon. There were mountains in the distance, and there were dunes, rocks, and plants that insisted on living where survival seemed impossible. There was the desert that he had wandered for so many months. Despite all that time, he knew only a small part of it. Within that small part, he had found an Englishman, caravans, tribal wars an oasis with fifty thousand palm trees and three hundred wells.

"What do you want here, today?" the desert asked him. "Didn't you spend enough time looking at me yesterday?"

"Somewhere you're holding the person I love," the boy said. "So, when I look out over your sands, I'm also looking at her. I want to return to her, and I need your help so that I can turn myself into the wind."

"What is love?" the desert asked.

And the boy answered, "Love is the falcon's flight over your sands. Because for him, you are a green field from which he always returns with game. He knows your rocks, your dunes, and your mountains, and you are generous to him."

"The falcon's beak carries bits of me, myself," the desert said. "For years I care for his game, for the little waterthat I have, and then I show him where the game is. And, one day, as I enjoy the fact that his game thrives on my surface, the falcon dives out of the sky, and takes away what I've created."

"But that's why you created the game in the first place," the boy answered. "To nourish the falcon. And the falcon then nourishes man. And, eventually, man will nourish your sands, where the game will once again flourish. That's how the world goes."

"So is that what love is?"

"Yes, that's what love is. It's what makes the game become the falcon, the falcon become the man, and man, in his turn, become the desert. It's what turns lead into gold, and makes the gold return to the earth."

"I don't understand what you're talking about," the desert said.

"But you can at least understand that somewhere in your sands there is a woman waiting for me. And that's why I have to turn myself into the wind."

CAPEN: Paulo Coehlo. His latest book, The Valkries. This is the Futurist Radio Hour.