If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.

There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again. I was entirely absorbed in that world as I wrote the book [The Kite Runner] and to see the final page of that manuscript whir out of the printer was a very special feeling indeed.

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

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.

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.

Michael Bealmear is a philanthropist, and he has become interested in the issue of refugees, and he proposed that we do an event in his community, where we could dedicate an entire evening focused on the global refugee crisis, focused primarily on Afghanistan.

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