I don’t know the nuts and bolts of writing. I studied medicine. I was a pre-med nerd. So everything I learned, I know about writing is very instinctive.
Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And.
I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.
I didn’t remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.
You’re not going to cry, are you? – I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.
In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.
Sad stories make good books.
Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.
In many parts of the world, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
For you, a thousand times over.
Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!
If there’s a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.
I don’t know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.
The experience of writing ‘The Kite Runner’ is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.
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.