Explore Quotes 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.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I grew up around a lot of Rumi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam books. My parents in Kabul had all the volumes around the house.

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

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

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.

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

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.