The Alchemist
The Alchemist
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Paulo Coelho on The Alchemist
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A reckoning with years lostCoelho had wanted to be a writer since adolescence, but spent his twenties and early thirties as a lyricist in Brazil, imprisoned and tortured by the military government for the political content of his songs, and still not writing the fiction he had long deferred. The 1986 pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela broke that stasis. The book that followed the pilgrimage forced a new question, and that question became the engine of the novel.
So I decided to write a metaphor, and this metaphor is The Alchemist: a novel about someone who needs to fulfill his or her dream, but takes too long because he or she thinks it’s impossible.
The correspondence between Coelho’s own delay and Santiago’s long, circuitous route to a treasure buried back where he started is not metaphorical in the loose sense. Coelho stated it as autobiography, twenty-five years after the book’s publication.
I was not searching for my treasure. My treasure is my journey, the same as for the shepherd boy.
Santiago, the shepherd boy at the novel’s center, travels from Andalusia to Egypt chasing a vision of treasure, only to learn it was always at home. Coelho spent years in the music industry before he arrived at the same conclusion about his own life.
When the book became a global phenomenon, readers and journalists began framing Coelho as a spiritual guide. He consistently refused that frame, returning instead to the book’s private, diagnostic function.
When I wrote ‘The Alchemist’, I was trying to understand my own life, and the only way that I could do it was through a metaphor. Then, the book – with no support of the press, because the media normally refuses to publish anything about an unknown writer – made its way to the readers, and the readers start to discover that we share the same questions.
How he wrote it
Already written in his soulThe claim that Coelho wrote The Alchemist in two weeks is often treated as apocryphal. When a Guardian interviewer put a more generous version of the story to him in 2009, he cut it back.
Two weeks. Yes. The book was already written in my soul.
The speed was possible in part because Coelho did nothing that most novelists would recognize as preparation. He set the story in Andalusia and Egypt and made his protagonist a shepherd without consulting a single source on what shepherding actually looks like. On the Tim Ferriss podcast, he explained what research he did do, which was none.
When I wrote The Alchemist, I wanted to write a metaphor about me, about my life. And, to be honest, I don’t know why I chose a shepherd boy. I’ve never been a shepherd. I did not do any research on shepherds. [paraphrased from audio]
The character in the novel Coelho most closely identifies with is not the young dreamer who acts, but the one who cannot move from knowledge to experience. That identification shaped how he understood the book’s argument.
In The Alchemist, I relate myself to the Englishman – someone who is trying to understand life through books. It’s quite interesting how many times we use books to understand life. I think that a book is a catalyst: it provokes a reaction.
The manuscript found its way into print, but the publishing relationship collapsed almost immediately. The first publisher returned the rights at the end of the first year, and Coelho and his wife left Rio de Janeiro and spent forty days in the Mojave Desert before he resumed knocking on doors.
I had a rough time with my second book The Alchemist. It was first published by a small publishing house and even though it sold well, at the end of the first year, the publisher decided to give me back the rights since, according to his words, ‘he could make more money in the stock exchange.’
Coelho drew an explicit line between the crystal merchant, the novel’s figure for infinite deferral, and his own years of refusing to write fiction. The parallel is not symbolic embellishment after the fact. He said it directly.
In The Alchemist there is a character, the crystal shop merchant. He has all the possibilities of fulfilling his destiny, but he’s always postponing, postponing, postponing. The same thing happened with me. [paraphrased from audio]
The crystal merchant dreams of making a pilgrimage to Mecca but never goes, because going would require surrendering the dream itself. By 1990, without a single significant press mention, Coelho had sold half a million copies of a book built around that character’s warning.
The personal thread
What the book cost and confirmedCoelho has described the years before the Santiago pilgrimage as years of knowing what he was supposed to do and choosing not to do it. When he reflects on what the novel ultimately confirmed for him personally, the cost of that delay sits alongside the vindication.
Dreams are what justify life. Dreamers are people who really changed this world. I believe in dreams. I followed mine. I paid a very high price at the given moment, but I do not grieve. I think a person without dreams is a tree without roots. So dreams are the language of God.
He also insisted, well after the book’s success, on the difference between film and the interior life a novel generates in each reader. That insistence led him to spend years actively sabotaging a film adaptation for which he had already sold the rights, and then offering more than the original price to buy them back. The studio refused, and he changed strategy.
I started to sabotage it. I am not sabotaging Hollywood, I am sabotaging the film. I don’t want them to turn any book of mine into a film. [paraphrased from audio]
His stated reason came down to where the book’s meaning lives: “I think that a book has a life of its own inside the reader’s mind.” Protecting that interior space was, for him, worth the fight.
What he wants us to sit with
The journey as the only destinationAsked what he hopes readers take from the novel, Coelho consistently deflects the role of instructor. But when pressed on what the book actually holds, he is specific about what alchemy means in its pages. He explained this to Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, where the conversation turned to the Soul of the World, the concept that recurs throughout the novel as the animating force connecting all things.
if I can define magic, I would say that it is a bridge that allows us to cross from just visible world to this invisible world.
He chose symbolic rather than argumentative language for a specific reason. The book makes no case for any doctrine. In an interview with New Idea magazine, he laid out what symbolic language can do that direct statement cannot.
There are no universal truths... But there is a soul of the world. I’m not trying to explain the universe. I believe life is a mystery, and it is better to try to fill our lives with meaningful things than to understand it. I use symbolic language because then you talk to your own soul.
On the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Coelho described what the novel’s own reception had taught him about its argument. The book had survived no publisher support, no press coverage, and a rights dispute. That survival, he said, was not separate from the book’s message.
the journey itself is the miracle; it is the blessing. There is no point to reach. You have to travel your journey with joy, hope, and challenges in your heart.