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.
Interpretation
Engage with varied literature to enhance your writing skills.
Khaled Hosseini's quote emphasizes the importance of reading diverse genres and styles of writing to develop one's own voice as a writer. By exposing yourself to a range of perspectives and techniques from different authors, you can gain valuable insights and inspiration that will improve your craft.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared Khaled Hosseini's quote to inspire participants to broaden their reading habits.
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 every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.
Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed... It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: 'Does your teacher use class time well?' and, 'When you're confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?'
It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me.
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