Khaled Hosseini

“I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung...”

“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 mu...”

“When I went to Kabul - weeks after I finished 'The Kite Runner' - I met a lot of people from all walks of life: men, women, children, people from ministries, hotel doormen, shopkeepers. And...”

“In my 20s, life seemed endless. At 49, I've had a chance to see how dark life can be, and I am far more aware of the constraints of time than when I wrote 'The Kite Runner.' I realise there...”

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

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

“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 traini...”

“Syria's neighboring countries cannot and should not carry the cost of caring for refugees on their own. The international community must share the burden with them by providing economic aid,...”

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

“I grew up around a lot of Rumi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam books. My parents in Kabul had all the volumes around the house.”

“I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.”

“I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.”

“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.”

“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 complete...”

“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 complete...”

“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.”

“My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and...”

“The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.”

“I - and, I suspect, millions of Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike - couldn't care less about Obama's middle name or the ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the...”

“Writing for me is largely about rewriting.”