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" Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world. "

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" Family is so central to Afghan life that all Afghan stories are family stories. Family is something I simply can't resist because all the great themes of human life - duty, grief, sacrifice, love, envy - you find all those things within families. "

Khaled Hosseini

Life

Envy

Love

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period. "

Khaled Hosseini

Kept

Read

" Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it's either before or after they've blown something up. "

" 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 only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime. "

" Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess. "

" I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure. "

" There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry. "

" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

People

Women

" 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. "

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

" Afghanistan is doomed if women are barred once again from public life. "

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

" When I went to Kabul - weeks after I finished 'The Kite Runner' - I met a lot of people from all walks of life: men, women, children, people from ministries, hotel doormen, shopkeepers. And I learned from them what daily life was like when the rockets were flying overhead. "

" My freshman year in college, I got a job working security. This was a high-tech building in Santa Clara, engineers coming in and out all the time. "

" I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed. "

" Too often, stories about Afghanistan center around the various wars, the opium trade, the war on terrorism. Precious little is said about the Afghan people themselves - their culture, their traditions, how they lived in their country and how they manage abroad as exiles. "

" I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself. "

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

" 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. "

" I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader. "

" 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 think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S. "

" 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. "

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

Khaled Hosseini

Going

Books

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

" 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. "