She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.

I think the changes that have happened, there have been come positive, but by and large, you have to say the changes have been negative. The situation has reached a fairly critical stage in Afghanistan.

If my book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community.

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me.

It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.