After all, life is not a Hindi movie. — Khaled Hosseini

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it. — Khaled Hosseini

Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her. — Khaled Hosseini

By then The Kite Runner had become quite successful and I found myself in a position that I had always dreamed of my whole life, which was to write for a living. — Khaled Hosseini

Life is a train, get on board. — Khaled Hosseini

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

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. — Khaled Hosseini

I’m a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. — Khaled Hosseini

Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for most part has been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. — Khaled Hosseini

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts. — Khaled Hosseini

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t. — Khaled Hosseini

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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

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

The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.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

I guess some stories do not need telling. — Khaled Hosseini

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

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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

I don’t know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me. — Khaled Hosseini

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

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

It’s hard when you make a film from a book that so many people love, because there’s no way to get the entire story into a two–hour movie. But I was pleased with the reaction [for Kite Runner]. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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

Fabio Celon did send me pages as he progressed, both in black and white and some color samples as well. It was really exciting to see the sketches and to see the story [The Kite Runner] shaping up visually. — Khaled Hosseini

A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later. — Khaled Hosseini

Writing for me is largely about rewriting. — 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. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

It’s often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It’s what writing comes down to––worrying that things aren’t going to work out. — Khaled Hosseini

I don’t know the nuts and bolts of writing. I studied medicine. I was a pre–med nerd. So everything I learned, I know about writing is very instinctive. — Khaled Hosseini

I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse. — Khaled Hosseini

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency. — Khaled Hosseini

It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself. — Khaled Hosseini

I think he loved us equally, but differently. — Khaled Hosseini

I’m gladly doing my own thing for the time being. — Khaled Hosseini

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

Time can be a greedy thing–sometimes it steals the details for itself. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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 . — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

He knew I’d seen everything in that alley, that I’d stood there and done nothing. He knew that I’d betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time. — Khaled Hosseini

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

Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions. — Khaled Hosseini

There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break.–Amir — Khaled Hosseini

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood. — Khaled Hosseini

That’s how children deal with terror, they fall asleep. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors. — Khaled Hosseini

It’s literally just been formed. It’s a 501 C3, non–profit charitable foundation called, unsurprisingly, the Khalled Hosseini Foundation. The aim is to help refugees and aim vulnerable women and children. — Khaled Hosseini

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 — Khaled Hosseini

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time. — Khaled Hosseini

A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated… — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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

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. — Khaled Hosseini

The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction. — Khaled Hosseini

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history. — Khaled Hosseini

All my life, I’d been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini

Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult. — Khaled Hosseini

Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. — Khaled Hosseini

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. — Khaled Hosseini