QUOTES by Khaled Hosseini
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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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen - it becomes distorted, and it's been diminished.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I felt on the periphery of high school culture; one of those invisible creatures that walk the campus. I think it was a lot worse for my parents.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
My parents were reasonably affluent in Kabul. In the States, we were on welfare. My mom became a waitress, and my dad became a driving instructor. That part of the American immigrant experience applies to people of any nationality.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I grew up around a lot of Rumi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam books. My parents in Kabul had all the volumes around the house.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
The strange dilemma of the 'ethnic-fiction' writer is that you are supposed to carry a banner for your homeland, be a voice for it, and educate the rest of the world about it, but I think that's far too onerous a burden for any writer to bear.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I - and, I suspect, millions of Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike - couldn't care less about Obama's middle name or the ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the William Ayers non-issue.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
There's nothing easy about writing. It's always difficult. It's always a struggle.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I am always revolted when Islamic leaders, from Afghanistan or elsewhere, deny the very existence of female oppression, avoid the issue by pointing to examples of what they view as Western mistreatment of women, or even worse, justify the oppression of women on the basis of notions derived from Sharia law.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
The only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
Family is so central to Afghan life that all Afghan stories are family stories. Family is something I simply can't resist because all the great themes of human life - duty, grief, sacrifice, love, envy - you find all those things within families.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini
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.
Quote by -Khaled Hosseini