Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir

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.

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

There [in The Kite Runner] certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative.