Khaled Hosseini Quotes

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

Give sustenance, Allah. Give sustenance to me.

All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I’ve ever written was because I don’t have a choice. I write stories because I can’t wait to tell it, I can’t wait to see how it ends.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

I have very fond memories of my childhood in Afghanistan, largely because my memories, unlike those of the current generation of Afghans, are untainted by the spectre of war, landmines, and famine.

I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.

I also felt The Kite Runner was a story that would lend itself well to a visual retelling in a graphic novel.

I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.

I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.

A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.

I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.

You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.

Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).

The film [Kite Runner] was not as big a hit in the United States as it was worldwide, I think it may have been swallowed up by all the other movies it had to go up against.

I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting.

He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.

If I ever do get married," Tariq said, "they'll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head

He had the blue kite in his hands; that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips.

[Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns] is not just unique to books, but films and music.

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.

It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.

After all, life is not a Hindi movie.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila.

Zindagi migzara (life goes on)

I came to the US as an immigrant and I recall vividly those first few years in California, the brief time we spent on welfare, and the difficult task of assimilating into a new culture.

On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.

you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.

I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.

She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.

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

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.

some stories don't need telling

He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.

I'm gladly doing my own thing for the time being.

I think he loved us equally, but differently.

Regret... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.