I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

Whether it's viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books I'm consistently impressed with their wit humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the 'Delete' option and restraining orders were invented.

Wherever my story takes me however dark and difficult the theme there is always some hope and redemption not because readers like happy endings but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in the morning that there is a light at the end of every tunnel.

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective that is all that writing is about.

I love readings and my readers but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful but I'm annoying and a phony.

By helping readers understand these mechanics I hope they will appreciate why freedom is for everyone why it is essential for our security and why the free world plays a critically important role in advancing democracy around the globe.

If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease we must demand the increase.

I have more freedom when I write fiction but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one is conveyed better in this form.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

I cook a little bit. I make a Hungarian dish called chicken paprikash that's out of this world. I'll give a heads-up to all of your readers that it doesn't have to be between Thai and Mexican every night. Toss some Hungarian in every once in a while. You will not be sorry. Good solid peasant food.