Afghanistan has always been sort of a fractured nation, very tribal, where the countryside and the distant provinces have been run by custom, by tribal law and by tribal leaders rather than edicts from the central government in Kabul.

Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.

If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.

The story line of my novel [The Kite Runner] is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined.

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it's either before or after they've blown something up.

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