Khaled Hosseini Quotes

You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.

You don't order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them 'sister' the next.

All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.

It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.

I did see [in Afghanistan] plenty that reminded me of my childhood. I recognised my old neighbourhood, saw my old school, streets where I had played with my brother and cousins.

I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S.

I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But i didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lip. I ran

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.

My own background is fairly liberal and so this notion of 'protecting women from outside intrusion' is not in my nature, nor in my upbringing.

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.

After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.

Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it's either before or after they've blown something up.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

I was overwhelmed with the kindness of people [in Afghanistan] and found that they had managed to retain their dignity, their pride, and their hospitality under unspeakably bleak conditions.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

I returned to Afghanistan because I had a deep longing to see for myself how people lived, what they thought of their government, how optimistic they were about the future of their homeland.

I don't know whom or what he was defying. [...] [M]aybe the God he had never believed in.

The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.

At the time we are focusing our efforts primarily on building shelters for refugees. Homelessness in Afghanistan is a huge problem.

If my book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community.

Even after The Kite Runner was published I continued to practice for another eighteen months. But I had always had a love of writing and a compulsion to do it.

Don't be afraid to tell the truth. It's better to hurt someone by truth than to make them happy by lies.

The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

I have been a fan of comic books since childhood.

I think the scale of the conflict [in Afghanistan] has dramatically changed in 2003. You're now facing a much more motivated, well-supported enemy. I don't see any quick end to this thing.

There [in The Kite Runner] certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative.

The story line of my novel [The Kite Runner] is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined.

The Kite Runner is a story of two boys and a father, and the strange love triangle that binds them.

We will also be funding projects that empower women and children in Afghanistan and now and then give scholarships to Afghan students here in the Bay Area.

I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.

the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.

She would grab whatever she could -a look , a whisper , a moan - to salvage from perishing , to perserve. But time is most unforgivving of fires , and she couldn't , in the end , save it all .

Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.

Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.

Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks.

There will be no floating waway. There will be no other reality tonight.

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.

My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write.

I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.

You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you.

You say their stories, it is gift they give you.

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.

At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.