The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.