All my life, I’d been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.
A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.
Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.
Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.
Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her.
Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.
I will follow you to the ends of the world.
There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. – Amir.
I don’t outline at all; I don’t find it useful, and I don’t like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.
There isn’t, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.
When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I’ve been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.
I don’t listen to music when I write – I find it distracting.
For a novelist, it’s kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.
Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.
I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.
Writing for me is largely about rewriting.
Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it’s either before or after they’ve blown something up.
I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both ‘The Kite Runner’ and ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ that’s obvious.
I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.