The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.

The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.

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.

In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I’ve ever written was because I don’t have a choice. I write stories because I can’t wait to tell it, I can’t wait to see how it ends.

After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.

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.