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"Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is."
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"I am more one for the story, I think, than the action."

"Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own."

"What so tedious as a twice-told tale?"

"As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections."

"To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else."

"If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me."

"Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait."

"Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters."

"For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school."

"Storytelling answers questions and solves mysteries."
Explore more quotes by Khaled Hosseini

"There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry."

"Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed."

"A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it."

"The reputation of a girl ... is a delicate thing. Like a mynah bird in your hands. slacken your grip and away it flies."

"My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters."

"There is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is."

"Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath."

"Public justice is the greatest kind of show, my brother. Drama. Suspense. And best of all education en masse."

"It would be an existence rife with difficulties... but of a pleasurable kind, difficulties they could take pride in, possess, value, as one would a family heirloom."
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