Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

I don't know whom or what he was defying. [...] [M]aybe the God he had never believed in.

People talk about apathy, especially in developed countries. We're kind of lulled into these tranquil lives, and we are pursuing our own thing and there is so much suffering on a mass scale around the world that you kind of become fatalistic. You might think suffering is inevitable, you kind of lose your sense of moral urgency. But there is always something you can do for someone in the world.

In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

For you, a thousand times over

She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.

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