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When you get a bad review, you hate the writer. It's very painful; whoever says the opposite lies. It's humiliating. Sometimes it comes from an honest place, but most times, it comes from a desire to trash someone.

If there's a good review, I'll skip over the headline, but I always find the bad reviews and read those. I don't know why. It's a little sick and demented.

I don't read reviews, and I try not to read articles about me. It taints your outlook: if you believe the good things, you've got to believe the bad things, too.

And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's sort of shaming in a way.

A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.

If the critics are right that I've made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.

Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.

To my undying shame, I do read reviews. I don't read them all, but I like to get some kind of idea how things are going.

To me, I read good reviews in lots of papers and bad reviews in lots of papers.