Khaled Hosseini Quotes

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Genuine, Passes

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Toil, Although

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Explore, Puzzles

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Painters, Jailed

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Bigger, Security

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Crave, Cherish

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Afghanistan, Solely

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cinematic, Books

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hip, Three

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Turtle, Chapter

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Intimate, Books

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Storytelling, Child

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poised, Period

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Classic, Wonder

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Spontaneity, Surprise

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Afghanistan, Oppression

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Precedence, Writer

• 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.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Chasm, Few

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Culture, African

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Choice, Wait

Khaled Hosseini (67)

Birth:	4th March, 1965
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Physician

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