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.

'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends it shows his mind working in real time sentence by sentence in what feels like a private audience with the reader.

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.

The demise of Google Reader if logical is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

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.

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.

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.

I mean my dad's a television producer and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

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.

The great work must inevitably be obscure except to the very few to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

I've always been an avid reader. If I don't have a book in the car I'll stop and pick one up just to have something to read. I don't even remember learning to read.

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.