Khaled Hosseini Quotes - Page 13

I experienced Kabul with my brother the way Amir and Hassan do: long school days in the summer, kite fighting in the winter time, westerns with John Wayne at Cinema Park, big parties at our house in Wazir Akbar Khan, picnics in Paghman.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

Kabul was a thriving cosmopolitan city with its vibrant artistic, intellectual and cultural life. There were poets, musicians, and writers. There was also an influx of western culture, art, and literature in the '60s and '70s.

For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban. I wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity for decades, that the history of the Afghans in the twentieth century has been largely pacific and harmonious.

I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history.

I returned to Kabul after a 27-year absence. I came away with some optimism but not as much as I had hoped for. The two major issues in Afghanistan are a lack of security outside Kabul (particularly in the south and east) and the powerful warlords ruling over the provinces with little or no allegiance to the central government. The other rapidly rising concern is the narcotic trade which, if not dealt with, may turn Afghanistan into another Bolivia or Colombia.

Equally important is the lack of cultivable land for farmers, a profound problem when you take into account that Afghanistan has always largely been an agricultural country, and that even before the wars destroyed lands and irrigation canals, only 5 per cent of the land was cultivable.

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

A great deal remains to be done in Afghanistan and the jury is out as to whether the international community has the commitment and the patience to see the rebuilding process through.

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.

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.

Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.

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.

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

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

A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver

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.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

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

I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great

If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.

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

Baba dropped the stack of food stamps on her desk. "Thank you but I don't want," Baba said. "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don't like it free money."...Baba walked out of the welfare office like a man cured of a tumor.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

Blood is a powerful thing