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" 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. "

Khaled Hosseini

Books

Giant

Music

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

Khaled Hosseini

Kept

Read

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing for me is largely about rewriting. "

Khaled Hosseini

Rewriting

Writing

" The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me. "

Khaled Hosseini

Success

Surprise

" 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. "

" 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

Doctor

Early

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

" 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

" 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. "

" I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read. "

" 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. "

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

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

Khaled Hosseini

Write

You

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way. "