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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

Job

Security

Time

" 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. "

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

Khaled Hosseini

Kept

Read

" 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 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. "

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

" I hate resting. I feel restless. My preference is to be working. "

" My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write. "

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

" Writing for me is largely about rewriting. "

Khaled Hosseini

Rewriting

Writing

" 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. "

" You don't need a cheerleader. That's the worst thing that can happen to you. "

" You must not believe your own PR; it would be grotesque. "

" 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. "

" Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated. "

Khaled Hosseini

American

Culture

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

" Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters. "

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

" I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart. "

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

" The deal is such that when I begin writing something, I open a door, and those characters come in, and then they won't leave, and so I live with them every day, all day. They are there with me when I'm driving my kids to school, when I'm standing in line at the grocery store. "

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

" To me, families are puzzles that take a lifetime to work out - or not, as often is the case - and I like to explore how people within them try to connect, be it through love, duty, or circumstance. "

" 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 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. "

" One of the things novels should do is shine a light on those parts of us that are common, the fibres that connect all of us. They should convey the sense that we're all connected, coming from the same tree, sharing common roots. "