The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

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

And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.

You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.