Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Khaled Hosseini
Life
World
Myself
" I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed. "
Khaled Hosseini
Father
Own
My Own
" There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry. "
Khaled Hosseini
Poetry
Tradition
Great
" A doctor in a hospital told me that when the mujaheddin were fighting in the early Nineties, he often performed amputations and Caesarean sections without anesthesia because there were no supplies. "
Khaled Hosseini
Me
Doctor
Early
" Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work. "
Khaled Hosseini
Act
Active
Reading
" You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen - it becomes distorted, and it's been diminished. "
Khaled Hosseini
True
Time
Page
" I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting. "
Khaled Hosseini
Write
Find
I Write
" My parents were reasonably affluent in Kabul. In the States, we were on welfare. My mom became a waitress, and my dad became a driving instructor. That part of the American immigrant experience applies to people of any nationality. "
Khaled Hosseini
Experience
Mom
States
" Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval. "
Khaled Hosseini
Nation
Conservative
Live
" My books never go where I think they're going. "
Khaled Hosseini
Go
Going
Books
" 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. "
Khaled Hosseini
Walking
Thoughts
Ocean
" 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. "
Khaled Hosseini
Stories
Father
Strong
" 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. "
Khaled Hosseini
Politics
Toil
Struggle
" My memories of Kabul are vastly different than the way it is when I go there now. My memories are of the final years before everything changed. When I grew up in Kabul, it couldn't be mistaken for Beirut or Tehran, as it was still in a country that's essentially religious and conservative, but it was suprisingly progressive and liberal. "
Khaled Hosseini
Go
Memories
Country
" I spent a lot of winters in my childhood flying kites with my brother, with my cousins, with friends in the neighborhood. It's what we did in the winter. Schools close down. There was not much to do. "
Khaled Hosseini
Childhood
Winter
Down
" I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films. "
Khaled Hosseini
Quality
Way
Writing
" When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that. "
Khaled Hosseini
Random
Time
People
" No one ever really read to me as a child. "
Khaled Hosseini
Me
Read
Child
" I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S. "
Khaled Hosseini
Born
Think
Baseball
" You have to be able to interact with people whose politics you disagree with. "
Khaled Hosseini
Whose
Disagree
People
" The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me. "
Khaled Hosseini
Me
Success
Surprise
" I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time. "
Khaled Hosseini
Come
Think
Time
" I felt on the periphery of high school culture; one of those invisible creatures that walk the campus. I think it was a lot worse for my parents. "
Khaled Hosseini
School
Think
Walk
" 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. "
Khaled Hosseini
Country
Precious
War
" 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
Become
You
Way
" You don't need a cheerleader. That's the worst thing that can happen to you. "
Khaled Hosseini
Cheerleader
You
Happen
" 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. "
Khaled Hosseini
People
Used
Write
" I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. "
Khaled Hosseini
People
Got
Book
" I'm so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other. "
Khaled Hosseini
Other
People
Love
" 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. "
Khaled Hosseini
Back
Think
Red