Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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

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.

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.

Afghan people are just so tired of war.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I hear from non-Afghan immigrants – Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs in France – all the time. These people have had to redefine their lives, which is what my family went through when we came to the U.S. in 1980.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve learned things about the craft of writing and about structuring a book and about character development and so on that I’ve just learned on the fly.

Obama’s middle name differs from my last name by only two vowels. Does the McCain-Palin campaign view me as a pariah, too? Do McCain and Palin think there’s something wrong with my name?

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.

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.

The deal is such that when I begin writing something, I open a door, and those characters come in, and then they won’t leave, and so I live with them every day, all day. They are there with me when I’m driving my kids to school, when I’m standing in line at the grocery store.

I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.

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.

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

I don’t listen to music when I write – I find it distracting.

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.

You have to be able to interact with people whose politics you disagree with.

Afghanistan is doomed if women are barred once again from public life.

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.

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 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.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

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

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

I’m so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other.

When I went to Kabul – weeks after I finished ‘The Kite Runner’ – I met a lot of people from all walks of life: men, women, children, people from ministries, hotel doormen, shopkeepers. And I learned from them what daily life was like when the rockets were flying overhead.

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

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

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.

I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You have to write every day, and you have to write whether you feel like it or not.

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

You must not believe your own PR; it would be grotesque.

My books never go where I think they’re going.

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’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.

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 landed in Kabul the day before Shock and Awe in Iraq, and you could all but hear the collective groan.

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.

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

To me, families are puzzles that take a lifetime to work out – or not, as often is the case – and I like to explore how people within them try to connect, be it through love, duty, or circumstance.

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.

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.

Syria’s neighboring countries cannot and should not carry the cost of caring for refugees on their own. The international community must share the burden with them by providing economic aid, investing in development in those countries, and opening their own borders to desperate Syrian families looking for protection.

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

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

Read the kinds of things you want to write; read the kinds of things you would never write. Learn something from every writer you read.

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

I would like people to have an appreciation for what happened to women under the Taliban, as in ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns.’ I hope they get a sense of how connected we all are.