Khaled Hosseini Quotes

There is a lot of pressure to top yourself... to come up with a 'Rumours II,' and that seemed like a trap.

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.

Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?'

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden.

Some people make a great film and then they can't follow up.

We're putting a lot of pressure on ourselves for this second album and so we want to make it as great as we possibly can.

I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'

I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.

Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.

I had written or cowritten eight of the ten songs on 'Beauty and the Beat,' and I had written our biggest hit, 'We Got the Beat.' How was I going to top all of that?

I struggled with the pressure of having the successful record after the first record. Second album syndrome. I'm living proof; it's very real.

You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.

Now that I understand how publishing schedules work, I can understand why many authors have the sophomore slump. A year is a long time to wait for a sequel, but it's a short, short time to WRITE a sequel.

There was an enormous amount of pressure when my first album took off, and I struggled with the speed of everything and the exhaustion from the constant touring.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

When you do a film as unique and original as 'Napoleon Dynamite,' it's hard then try to repeat what audiences loved the first time.

Every time you have to come up with a new body of work for a new show, you're aware that people are just ready to rip you apart, they're just waiting for you to fall or make the slightest trip up.

I thought that there might be something unsatisfying about directing two Tolkien movies after 'Lord of the Rings.' I'd be trying to compete with myself and deliberately doing things differently.

The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

I didn't want to play it boring and safe. I also didn't want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they're even scarier than first ones.

I would say 'struggling' is a good word. We were all struggling to keep doing what we were doing, and more things were expected of us. I mean, one of the big things was how in the world are we going to top 'Hotel California?'