The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner
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Khaled Hosseini on The Kite Runner
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A banned sport and a buried countryThe book began with a news segment, not a plan. Hosseini was watching television in early 1999 when a report on Taliban restrictions mentioned, almost as an aside, that kite fighting had been banned across Afghanistan. The detail landed because it was his detail: he had grown up flying kites in Kabul’s Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, and the ban collapsed the distance between a news story and a childhood.
It mentioned in passing that among the things the Taliban had banned was the sport of kite fighting, which I had grown up playing alongside my brother and my cousins in Kabul. This struck a personal chord with me and I turned off the TV and suddenly found myself sitting at the computer, typing a short story.
That first story was personal, but the larger ambition that grew around it was political in the most quiet sense. By 2001, with the manuscript expanding into a novel, Hosseini was aware that most Western readers could not picture Afghanistan outside the contexts of Soviet occupation, opium, or al-Qaeda. He wanted the book’s opening third to do something the news cycle had stopped doing: restore a place that had existed before the wreckage.
I kind of wanted to re-create that lost time and era in at least the first third of this book and to kind of bring life — a sweeter, more innocent Kabul that I remember from my childhood and to remind the reader that Afghanistan wasn’t always about the caves of Tora Bora and bombings and land mines and so on; that there was a better time in that country’s history and not that long ago.
After September 11, Hosseini was roughly two-thirds through the manuscript and nearly abandoned it, convinced no American reader would want an Afghan voice at that moment. His wife disagreed, and her argument was specific: the very saturation of Taliban-and-terror coverage was exactly what made a different Afghan story necessary. The passage below is Hosseini rendering her case, nearly verbatim, in an essay he wrote a decade after the book’s publication.
This was, she felt, the ideal time in fact to tell the world an Afghan story. Much of what was being written about Afghanistan in those days and sadly, still now, revolved around the Taliban, Bin Laden, and the war on terror. Misconceptions and preconceived notions about Afghanistan abounded. Your book can show them a different face of Afghanistan, my wife said. A more human face.
He finished the manuscript. The Kite Runner was published in 2003 and spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
How he wrote it
Three a.m. instincts and four complete rewritesHosseini was still practicing internal medicine in California when he decided to expand the short story into a novel in March 2001. He could not write in the evenings after long clinic days, so he carved out a window before his patients arrived, sacrificing sleep for three hours of uninterrupted work every morning. That constraint shaped the book as much as any craft decision.
I cut down on my sleeping time. I awoke daily at 5 AM, wrote from then until roughly 8 AM, at which point I got ready to go and see my patients. The bulk of my first novel was written in those dark, early morning hours, a feat which I would be hard pressed to repeat now, a dozen years later.
He did not work from an outline. For Hosseini, plotting in advance would have killed the thing that kept him at his desk before dawn: genuine uncertainty about where the story was going. The decision was not laziness or inexperience but a considered position about where novels find their life.
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.
The first draft was the frame; the real novel emerged in revision. In a BookVideosTV interview recorded after the book’s success, Hosseini described a process in which his characters were, in early drafts, essentially placeholders waiting for their actual personalities to arrive.
Hosseini said he rewrites “extensively” and that The Kite Runner “probably” went through “three or four drafts,” finding it was in those rewrites that his characters “really find their voice” and he discovers “the depth and the subtext in the story.” [paraphrased from audio]
A decade after publication, with two more novels behind him, Hosseini looked back at The Kite Runner with the eyes of a more experienced writer. His verdict on the prose was clear-eyed rather than bitter: he understood why the book connected, and he also understood exactly what he would do to it now if given the chance.
Yeah, it looks like the work of somebody younger than me... I’m glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now and I went back … I’d take that thing apart.
The personal thread
The flea market was realReaders often ask how much of Amir is Hosseini. He is careful to separate the plot, which is invented, from the texture, which is not. The Kabul of the 1970s, the social hierarchies between Pashtuns and Hazaras, and the particular disorientation of building a life in California are drawn from lived experience, not archival research. One scene in particular is nearly documentary.
The story line and characters in The Kite Runner are fictional. However, there are autobiographical elements woven through the narrative. The descriptions of Kabul circa 1970’s, the social set up, the political milieu, are based on my own recollection and experiences... Probably the passages most resembling my own life are the ones in the US, with Amir and Baba trying to build a new life. I too came to the U.S. as an immigrant and I recall vividly those first few years in California, the hard task of assimilating into a new culture. My father and I did work for a while at the flea market and there really were rows of Afghans we knew from Kabul.
Beyond setting and immigrant experience, Hosseini is frank that the act of writing this novel felt less like authorship and more like compulsion. He resists the framing of the novelist as teacher partly because it misrepresents what actually drove him to the keyboard at five in the morning, and partly because he thinks the burden of representation distorts fiction.
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. That’s the way this novel was written. I don’t want to say there is an intent to educate. That is too much of a burden for a novelist.
What he wants us to sit with
An entry point, not an endpointThe most direct statement of what Hosseini hoped the book would accomplish is also the most modest. He did not claim to explain Afghanistan. He wanted readers to remember that the country had a before, a civilian life that preceded the sequence of wars that had made Afghanistan, for most Western readers, synonymous with catastrophe.
I want them to see that the Afghan people existed before there was a war with the Soviets and before there was a Taliban.
At the same time, Hosseini is deliberate about the limits of what a novel can or should carry. The book is not a history, and he says so plainly. When readers treat The Kite Runner as a comprehensive account of Afghan life, he pushes back: fiction opened the door, but the reader has to walk through it themselves.
I have never intended for my books to be representative of what Afghan life is. I hope people dig much deeper than that and read history books and learn more about Afghanistan in that way.
What surprised him most was the geography of the response. He had written about Kabul, about Pashtun guilt and Hazara loyalty, about a very specific class of Afghan immigrant in California. The letters that arrived came from people who had nothing in common with those settings but recognized something else entirely.
In these letters, I see the unique ability fiction has to connect people, and I see how universal some human experiences are: shame, guilt, regret, love, friendship, forgiveness, and atonement.
That universality showed up most concretely in what young readers did with the novel’s central promise. The phrase ‘There is a way to be good again,’ spoken to Amir by his father’s old friend Rahim Khan, became the line readers quoted back to Hosseini most often. In a Fox 9 interview, he described what students told him it had moved them to do.
Students tell him the phrase “There’s a way to be good again” — the book’s “de facto tagline” — “inspired them to look inwards, to mend broken ties.” [paraphrased from audio]
A novel about betrayal in Kabul in 1975 prompting a teenager in Nebraska to call someone they had wronged: Hosseini cites this kind of displacement as the specific thing fiction can do that reportage cannot.