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

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

When I was in Afghanistan in 2007, I went from village to village where refugees had returned, and they were living out in the open under tents, sometimes completely exposed to the environment. And they were homeless, which meant they would lose children in the winter to the cold and in the summers in the extreme heat. It's extremely humiliating for them to be homeless, culturally it's very shameful.

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.