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" 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

World

Think

Voice

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" For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture. "

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

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

" Afghan people are just so tired of war. "

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

Khaled Hosseini

Kept

Read

" 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. "

" People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections. "

" No one ever really read to me as a child. "

Khaled Hosseini

Read

Child

" 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. "

" I'm so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious. "

" 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. "

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

Khaled Hosseini

Jury

Whether

" You have to write every day, and you have to write whether you feel like it or not. "

Khaled Hosseini

Write

You

" 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. "

" 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

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

" Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "