My whole damn family was nice. I don't think I've imagined it. It's true. Maybe it has to do with being brought up as Christian Scientists. Half of my relatives were Readers or Practitioners in the church.
Our ministry is supported entirely by faith through the missions gifts of readers who receive my messages every three weeks. We seldom mention money and we never burden supporters.
But because we've all been readers we know what the experience is like and we hope that what certain writers have given to us we will give to someone.
Literature overtakes history for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.
By presenting a faithful and honest record of my experience as a mother I hope to show both my readers and my children how truth can redeem even what you fear might be the gravest of sins.
If you know how to read you have a complete education about life then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers and we should keep it that way.
The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.
Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.
One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely surprisingly good fortune with readers and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.
Both my mum and dad were great readers and we would go every Saturday morning to the library and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature and all of us would come with an armful of books.
We have newsreaders behaving like actors lowering their voices if it's a sad story as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't a single cool newsreader.
By and large the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is after all a form of communication.
I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me and my website has built up a community of readers which is a lot of fun.
To me the print business model is so simple where readers pay a dollar for all the content within and that supports the enterprise.
Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.
The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday when it will wind up in the Saturday papers which if you were readers then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.