Khaled Hosseini Quotes

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.

I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

By the time I sit down ready to write, I've done a lot of longhand and a lot of note collecting along the way.

It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters.

I think that I've just kind of found my niche, if that makes sense. I still write the same, but I feel like I've found what separates me, and I always try to stay in that when I write. It took me a long time to discover that, so I try to be protective.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Just start writing and you'll find what you want to say.

When I'm writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I've got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That's really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind - I'll never say it's not there because I don't know - but it's not really what I'm thinking about.

Thinking visually is my starting point, and then the writing happens.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.