Top 60 Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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

I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself.

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’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’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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

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.

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.

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 do live with the very real possibility that we don’t have endless stories to tell.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

One of the things novels should do is shine a light on those parts of us that are common, the fibres that connect all of us. They should convey the sense that we’re all connected, coming from the same tree, sharing common roots.

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

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

My freshman year in college, I got a job working security. This was a high-tech building in Santa Clara, engineers coming in and out all the time.

There’s no excuse for the macro corruption, but Afghanistan was always an informal society with a weak central government.

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

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

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.

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

Afghan people are just so tired of war.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

No one ever really read to me as a child.

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 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.

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.

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