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
In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.
I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.
I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.
You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.
Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.
I finally had what I'd wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.
I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks.
I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S.
Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.
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.
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.
I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.
There's nothing easy about writing. It's always difficult. It's always a struggle.