Paulo Coelho Quotes

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.

Everything in life is a double-edged sword.

It is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.

So much of life is paradox. So much of life is neither one thing nor the other... it's both things at the same time.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.

Life is everything and nothing all at once.

Truth is always paradoxical.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

Power is paradoxical.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

There's a dark side to everything.

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.