This is what Paulo Coelho thought being a writer means when he was 15-
A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars , arguing with other dishevelled , bespectacled writers. He says very ‘deep’ things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he just published.
A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is that he has been born into the age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean, losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of an average man is made of 3000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 words in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
When he wants to shock somebody he says things like’ Eienstein was a fool’ or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie’.
When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says ‘I am a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.
When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of.
This is from the book ‘Like the Flowing River ‘-by Paul Coelho.
