Let your story grow. Let it surprise you, and it will certainly surprise your readers.

We as authors sign a pact with our readers; they'll go on reading because they trust us to play fair with them and deliver what we've promised.

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

"Do you have any advice for your readers?

It's not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I'll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction-until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define "literature". The Latin root simply means "letters". Those letters are either delivered-they connect with an audience-or they don't. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that's because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books-and thus what they count as literature-really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

I love the quote: "No one else is you, and that is your superpower." It's what I sign in my books for readers because it completely sums up what I believe about myself and how I relate to others: We are all unique, worthy, and bring something to the table. So there is room for everyone to eat. No one should ever be turned away.

I can blend words easily with my pen, and show concepts from deep within. Yet not everyone gets the message I send. So why do I even let these words begin? Maybe they will soak in one day at the right time. When the readers on a new path to find. So for now I'll continue to drop ink and not worry about what other people think.

Anyway-because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next-and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis-at any time of night or day.

The library smells like old books - a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing Goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

"I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Many, many readers have written asking me wistfully about the nature of Sam and Grace's relationship, and I can assure you, that sort is absolutely real. Mutual, respectful, enduring love is completely attainable as long as you swear you won't settle for less.

I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.

Apart from a few simple principles the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form as a reader I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort however flawed.

I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised perhaps shocked at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment caused by nature or the universe or technology what readers want to see is how people cope and so the character are present to cope or fail to cope.

Readers probably haven't heard much about it yet but they will. Quantum technology turns ordinary reality upside down.

I was one of the first authors to have an active website. I'm totally obsessed with technology. I'm always looking for ways to connect with my readers. I answer all my fan mail.

I wanted to be a teacher but I was a lousy student one of the slowest readers. It was a tremendous struggle. But I'm lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.

If there is any secret to my success I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel and therefore I think my readers care about them.

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science it is an aid to art.