Khaled Hosseini Quotes

Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

How wonderful it was to sit on a set with Norman Mailer and get to know him.

I think John le Carre is, at 77, the greatest living writer alive. He is a master craftsman.

I have a huge author crush on Stephen King. Have never met him. Would probably embarrass myself. But it would be worth it.

At a certain point he was very popular, from THE RAVEN. He was never fully appreciated, never made the money, and you know he was looked upon with admiration by some people, but also as an oddball. But that was his point.

Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.

V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

As cliche as that sounds, Maya Angelou is one of the best writers I've ever read. She's very wise and to the point.

I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.

James Baldwin is probably, for me and for many other people, one of the most extraordinary authors in this country, black or white. And he is somebody who changed my life.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

The simple fact is, the more people who buy your books, the more are likely to read you. That's what I'd like to see happen.

We're so used to seeing Agatha Christie's work on screen that going back to the original is a real joy.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.

For me, as a writer, I desperately want to be read. I'm very conscious of readers as I'm writing. I think, 'If you write for yourself, then why don't you just keep it under the bed,' so I definitely write for other people.

The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.