I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.

In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

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.

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

Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.