Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

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

I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.

You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP.

I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.