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

Khaled Hosseini

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" Afghan people are just so tired of war. "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini

" 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

" Writing for me is largely about rewriting. "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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

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

Khaled Hosseini

" The jury is out as to whether the Afghans are up to the task of protecting their people. "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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

" 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

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

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 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

" I hear from non-Afghan immigrants - Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs in France - all the time. These people have had to redefine their lives, which is what my family went through when we came to the U.S. in 1980. "

Khaled Hosseini

" Obama's middle name differs from my last name by only two vowels. Does the McCain-Palin campaign view me as a pariah, too? Do McCain and Palin think there's something wrong with my name? "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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

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

Khaled Hosseini

" For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda. "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini

" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

" I've learned things about the craft of writing and about structuring a book and about character development and so on that I've just learned on the fly. "

Khaled Hosseini

" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

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

Khaled Hosseini