Afghani - Novelist | March 4, 1965 -
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 training in writing.
Khaled Hosseini
TrainingMedicalSchoolCollege
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.
LifeFamilyLoveGreatGriefEnvy
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.
MeWritingSmallStartSurprise
Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.
WorkReadingActiveActTakes
It's a very nice kind of quasi-fame being a writer, because you remain largely anonymous and you can have a private life, which I really cherish. I don't like to be in the public light all that much. I don't crave the whole fame thing at all.
LifeLightYouFameNiceKind
My memories of Kabul are vastly different than the way it is when I go there now. My memories are of the final years before everything changed. When I grew up in Kabul, it couldn't be mistaken for Beirut or Tehran, as it was still in a country that's essentially religious and conservative, but it was suprisingly progressive and liberal.
MemoriesCountryGoWayConservative
Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.
LivePeopleConservativeNationOut
The only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime.
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I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.
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Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.
WomenHistorySufferingWorldThink
I'm so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other.
LovePeopleDestroyHowFascinated
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.
CharacterWritingFlyBookCraft
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