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Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses.

I've learned the hard way at the national level that any erroneous statement will very quickly be magnified. So, as someone who talks for a living, I've learned to check, double-check and triple-check my sources.

A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.

I'm from Europe, and I was very aware that there are a lot of literature snobs - especially in Europe. As soon as something becomes a success, it has to be bad, and then they'll do everything they can to stab it to death.

Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we're sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

Authors worry. We worry about writing. Worry about our editors, our agents, our reviews, and our readers. We worry about everything, including all forms of social media including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and personal websites.