Top 422 Quotes & Sayings by Khaled Hosseini

I don't remember how I picked up 'Different Seasons,' but it was a book I read on a grave shift. I was absolutely floored by it; 'The Body,' a story about kids who go searching for a corpse in the woods, impacted me especially.

I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.

Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.

You don't need a cheerleader. That's the worst thing that can happen to you.

Everything for me starts very small and snowballs. So I rarely start with the grand idea and find a place for it and narrow down. It's, really, just start small, and as I'm writing it, I begin to see - sometimes to my own surprise - what's unfolding and what's blooming.

Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.

I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.

I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

The Taliban's acts of cultural vandalism - the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas - had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors.

I remember reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an 'Aha!' moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.

All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I've ever written was because I don't have a choice. I write stories because I can't wait to tell it, I can't wait to see how it ends.

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.

The only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime.

In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

In my 20s, life seemed endless. At 49, I've had a chance to see how dark life can be, and I am far more aware of the constraints of time than when I wrote 'The Kite Runner.' I realise there is only a limited number of things I can do.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

I hate resting. I feel restless. My preference is to be working.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.

Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it's either before or after they've blown something up.

I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing.

I spent a lot of winters in my childhood flying kites with my brother, with my cousins, with friends in the neighborhood. It's what we did in the winter. Schools close down. There was not much to do.

I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.

A doctor in a hospital told me that when the mujaheddin were fighting in the early Nineties, he often performed amputations and Caesarean sections without anesthesia because there were no supplies.

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

My memories of Kabul are vastly different than the way it is when I go there now. My memories are of the final years before everything changed. When I grew up in Kabul, it couldn't be mistaken for Beirut or Tehran, as it was still in a country that's essentially religious and conservative, but it was suprisingly progressive and liberal.

My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write.

I'm fascinated by the way early experiences haunt and revisit you, remain present in your life for decades and decades - they can even shape who you ultimately become.

There's nothing easy about writing. It's always difficult. It's always a struggle.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S.

I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.

American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.

A Western-style democracy in Afghanistan is a dream. I don't see that as a reality anytime soon. But I think some form of representative political process is not that far-fetched.

I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.

Life just doesn't care about our aspirations, or sadness. It's often random, and it's often stupid and it's often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.

Too often, stories about Afghanistan center around the various wars, the opium trade, the war on terrorism. Precious little is said about the Afghan people themselves - their culture, their traditions, how they lived in their country and how they manage abroad as exiles.

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.

I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.

My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters.

I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting.

In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

It's a very nice kind of quasi-fame being a writer, because you remain largely anonymous and you can have a private life, which I really cherish. I don't like to be in the public light all that much. I don't crave the whole fame thing at all.

Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world.

I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.

My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and predictability, who want to belong to something bigger than them, who want love and affection in their life, who want a good future for the children.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word.

For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.