I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting.

You don't have to donate money, it can be clothes, or books, or mediavl supplies. So there's so much that can be done [for refugees], the most difficult thing is that first step that decision to do something.

Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.

You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP.

One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.

The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.