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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. "

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" 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

You

Relationship

Love

" 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. "

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

Khaled Hosseini

Going

Books

" There's nothing easy about writing. It's always difficult. It's always a struggle. "

" You have to be able to interact with people whose politics you disagree with. "

" 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. "

" The strange dilemma of the 'ethnic-fiction' writer is that you are supposed to carry a banner for your homeland, be a voice for it, and educate the rest of the world about it, but I think that's far too onerous a burden for any writer to bear. "

" 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 entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing. "

" 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. "

" I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift. "

" I remember reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an 'Aha!' moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter. "

" I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting. "

" Afghan people are just so tired of war. "

" I don't remember how I picked up 'Different Seasons,' but it was a book I read on a grave shift. I was absolutely floored by it; 'The Body,' a story about kids who go searching for a corpse in the woods, impacted me especially. "

" Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings. "

" 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. "

" 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

Doctor

Good

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. "

" The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again. "

" 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

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

Khaled Hosseini

Kept

Read

" 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. "