The world would be a very sad place if readers could only love one story.

I know what the attitudes of the readers are: These are guys who love women and respect women.

Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link they have engaged with the poem.

I didn't want to be a writer but I became one. And now I have many readers in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it and it is strange to say it this way but I respect it.

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.