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
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 must not believe your own PR; it would be grotesque.
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 is only a limited number of things I can do.
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 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.
You don't need a cheerleader. That's the worst thing that can happen to you.
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 - 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 William Ayers non-issue.
I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.
I grew up around a lot of Rumi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam books. My parents in Kabul had all the volumes around the house.
Afghan people are just so tired of war.
I do live with the very real possibility that we don't have endless stories to tell.
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.
I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word.
I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.
Writing for me is largely about rewriting.
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.
I would like people to have an appreciation for what happened to women under the Taliban, as in 'A Thousand Splendid Suns.' I hope they get a sense of how connected we all are.
My books never go where I think they're going.
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.
Afghanistan is doomed if women are barred once again from public life.
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 I learned from them what daily life was like when the rockets were flying overhead.
I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself.
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.
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?
Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.
The jury is out as to whether the Afghans are up to the task of protecting their people.
You have to be able to interact with people whose politics you disagree with.
I'm so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other.
Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.
Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.
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.
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.
One of the things novels should do is shine a light on those parts of us that are common, the fibres that connect all of us. They should convey the sense that we're all connected, coming from the same tree, sharing common roots.
I hate resting. I feel restless. My preference is to be working.
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.
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.
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.
There's no excuse for the macro corruption, but Afghanistan was always an informal society with a weak central government.
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.
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, investing in development in those countries, and opening their own borders to desperate Syrian families looking for protection.
No one ever really read to me as a child.
I landed in Kabul the day before Shock and Awe in Iraq, and you could all but hear the collective groan.
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'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.
You have to write every day, and you have to write whether you feel like it or not.
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.
I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.
