If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

This is the point being missed by readers who lament Liquor's lack of hot sex scenes probably because they aren't old enough to understand that a passionate relationship could be about anything other than sex.

Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison but I don't have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.

This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves as a possession.

Among the letters my readers write me there is a certain category which is continuously growing and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

In my books and in romance as a genre there is a positive uplifting feeling that leaves the reader with a sense of encouragement and hope for a brighter future - or a brighter present.

Aside from sales the letters from readers have been primarily positive.

As writers and readers as sinners and citizens our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I don't want to force my politics on my readers.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that though lacking a novel's length satisfies the reader.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife who was very smart about poetry.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.