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It's not the journalists; it's the critics that I can't understand. I've never understood what kind of a person would want to criticize someone else's work.

But I honestly don't read critics. My dad reads absolutely everything ever written about me. He calls me up to read ecstatic reviews, but I always insist that I can't hear them. If you give value to the good reviews, you have to give value to the criticism.

I personally read criticism - at least by writers I enjoy - to stimulate a conversation in my own mind, and I like to think that's the function I serve for others.

Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it's easier than ever to document private experiences and divulge the most intimate secrets.

I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves.

When you're free of editorial control, you owe it to yourself to obtain feedback from friends and readers. Some take those criticisms to heart and incorporate it into their work, and some ignore them.

Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

There used to be that you only had four or five critics that you would look to for intelligent conversation, but now there are millions of people who can just press 'send,' and everyone's got an opinion even if no one cares what they say. It makes things a little bit tougher.