My books never go where I think they're going.
Interpretation
The author's writing journey often takes unexpected turns, revealing deeper insights than initially planned.
In this quote, Khaled Hosseini expresses the unpredictable nature of the creative process. When writing, he discovers that his thoughts and narratives evolve in ways he did not anticipate, leading to richer and more profound stories than he initially envisioned. This highlights the organic nature of storytelling, where characters and plot developments can take on lives of their own.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I used this quote to explain how unpredictable the writing process can be.
You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.
There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir
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.
And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
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