Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseiniis an Afghan-born American novelist and physician. After graduating from college, he worked as a doctor in California, an occupation that he likened to "an arranged marriage". He has published three novels, most notably his 2003 debut The Kite Runner, all of which are at least partially set in Afghanistan and feature an Afghan as the protagonist. Following the success of The Kite Runner he retired from medicine to write full-time...
NationalityAfghani
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 March 1965
CityKabul, Afghanistan
I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home
I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.
I also felt The Kite Runner was a story that would lend itself well to a visual retelling in a graphic novel.
Writing for me is largely about rewriting.
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.
All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.
I think the scale of the conflict [in Afghanistan] has dramatically changed in 2003. You're now facing a much more motivated, well-supported enemy. I don't see any quick end to this thing.
i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.
Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.
There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
[Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns] is not just unique to books, but films and music.
I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.
People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.
Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it's either before or after they've blown something up.