The Brazilian lyricist Paolo Cuelo is best known for his book, The Alchemist, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 400 weeks.

He is one of the most widely read authors in the world, with over 200 million copies of his book, Sold.

He also has more than 39 million followers across Twitter and Facebook, and rarely gives traditional media interviews.

Today, we meet the man behind the writings. We explore what he's touched in modern people with his fable-like stories that turn life, love, writing, and reading into pilgrimage.

Every morning, I find myself a different person. I'm always a mystery to myself. If I knew in the first hours of the morning what I'm going to do, what is going to happen, what attitude or decision should I take,

I think my life will be deadly boring, because what makes life interesting is the unknown. It is the risks that we take every single moment of a single day.

I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on being.

Pello Cuelo's personal trajectory is the basis for the unlikely journeys that anchor his fiction. His early dream to be a writer was discouraged by the strict Jesuits who schooled him and by his parents who institutionalized their introverted son.

He followed their dream for a time and went to law school, then became a songwriter and hippie in the era of hippies. Walking the ancient road to Santiago de Compostela in 1986 brought Pello Cuelo to a literary and spiritual turning point. I spoke with him in 2014.

You know, where I'd like to start is you've written quite a lot about the religious background of your childhood as having many aspects of being punishing and joyless.

But I wonder if you think about the spiritual background of your childhood, perhaps a spiritual sensibility that was forming in you even if you didn't know it. How would you think about that?

Well, I didn't know very well because I was forced to believe in God. I was forced to pray. I was in a Jesuit school.

It was very difficult for me to accept God and spirituality because when you try to force someone to do this, it's not the best way to open the doors of this unknown world to someone.

But at the end of the day, they taught me something very important that it is discipline.

And then by discipline, of course, I went through a period that I denied everything that I learned because for the reasons that I told you.

But then when I returned it, and I was already 40 years old, because after my pilgrimage to San Tiago de Compostela, then it was fantastic because it was a choice, not something that was imposed on me.

Right. Right. And that's so much more a story of our time, I think, people choosing their spiritual and religious lives rather than merely inheriting them in their families, which happened for so many centuries, really.

Absolutely. Because for a period, for example, when I was a drop out and I left everything behind, I left my family, I left my school, I left the dreams of my parents behind because they wanted me to be an engineer.

And then of course, I was fascinated by a different spirituality, like the hippies were here. So I became a little bit of everything.

So I was a Buddhist, then I was a Hare Krishna, then I was a little bit of everything.

And then I realized that what is my blood is Krishna, so then of course I returned to Krishna, each after the pilgrimage to San Tiago de Compostela.

So Christianity was your mother tongue, your homeland. It's not interesting that you reached home, in a way you came back home because of this pilgrimage.

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