Khaled Hosseini Quotes

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

I've never abandoned the novel.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

If you don't like my book, write your own.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.

I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of material that's ended up in the book.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

I couldn't have opened a store without putting books with the clothes. I am still writing as I have always done, and have published my ninth book "L'envers à l'endroit" last year. I am currently working on a dictionary of my favourite words.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"