Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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Khaled Hosseini

Profession : Novelist

Birth : March 4, 1965

I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.

Khaled Hosseini

Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.

Khaled Hosseini

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

Khaled Hosseini

In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

Khaled Hosseini

In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.

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

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

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.

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'm so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other.

Khaled Hosseini

I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini

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

I'm fascinated by the way early experiences haunt and revisit you, remain present in your life for decades and decades - they can even shape who you ultimately become.

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

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 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 difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

Khaled Hosseini

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.

Khaled Hosseini

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

Khaled Hosseini