I had really good teachers in high school. Probably I connected the best with an English teacher that I had my junior year in high school, Miss Sanchez, Jan Sanchez — God bless her. I’m still in touch with her, had lunch a couple of years ago, and we email each other and still exchange, recommend books to each other: “What novel are you reading lately? I read this book — you want to read this.” That kind of thing. But she really was the first time — I remember it was in her class that I read The Grapes of Wrath , which was the first time I had read a novel in English where I felt like I got it at the time. I had the, I felt really connected to the writer and to the story. I told her how much I loved that book and what it meant to me, and I think I saw part of my own family, and a lot of the Afghans in that story — people who would, they become uprooted and homeless and kind of drifting around trying to find a new home. So Jan Sanchez was probably my favorite teacher in high school, and although I never shared with her any of my writing, she came to one of my book readings as a surprise. I hadn’t seen her in over two decades, and she showed up, and she goes, “Remember me?” Obviously, I knew immediately who she was, and it made me so proud that she had read my book and she had loved it. I felt like I had done good. You know, when your teacher comes up to you, even if you are middle-aged and have your own family, having your teacher come up to you and pat you on the back is still a pretty special feeling.

The person that inspired me the most was Judah Folkman. He was the man that I worked with when I was a postdoctoral fellow. He was really an inspirational person for a variety of reasons. One, he was a big thinker, and lots of people told him that his ideas wouldn’t work or that they were impossible. He persevered in spite of that, and did very, very well. And secondly, he was very encouraging, very sort of like positive reinforcement, in terms of how he would deal with me and others. So I would say he certainly had a pivotal influence on my career when I was a postdoctoral fellow.

My great aunt was probably the greatest influence in my life. She was crippled. She never walked in her life. She crawled over the floor all her life. When my mother had to go out into the fields when we were smaller children, and then later go to California, she left us with my aunt, and my aunt could do everything except walk. She cooked the food for us, would bring everything to the stove. We had an old wood-burning stove. She cooked the food for us. She washed our clothes on this old washboard. We had to bring all the stuff there, the water, the soap, the washboard itself. She also disciplined us. So we had to break our own switch to get our punishment if we did something wrong. So we’d go out and break our own switch and come back and take our punishment.

My father was my major teacher, disciplinarian. But my mother lent a lot to me and to my life, in that, when things weren’t going right, or when my father was too tough, I had the soft feel of my mother to help me, and she did. And she a lot of the times gave me confidence that I needed to overcome some of the things that happened that weren’t so pleasant.

One day you write nothing, the next you write eight pages. It’s not in your hands.

I don’t think I am either as ruthlessly selfish as I was then, but I think that unhappiness made me terribly terribly selfish.

Every morning, Monday to Friday, I get up at 7am and make my wife breakfast in bed.

The lecture that I’m proudest of [reprinted in the book as “In the Oxford Madrasa”] is the one that I gave in 2016 about conservatism being in a hopeless philosophical mess.

I get to airports ridiculously early. It’s an uncontrollable urge.

I was jealous as hell.