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. – 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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – 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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – 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. – Khaled Hosseini
I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – 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. – Khaled Hosseini
I landed in Kabul the day before Shock and Awe in Iraq, and you could all but hear the collective groan. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – 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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – 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. – 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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – Khaled Hosseini
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? – Khaled Hosseini
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. – Khaled Hosseini
I do live with the very real possibility that we don’t have endless stories to tell. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – 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. – Khaled Hosseini
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. – Khaled Hosseini
