I have gotten a couple of letters meant for Mr. Bean aka Rowan Atkinson. These letters would say things like, 'You're so funny, you make me laugh, with your big rubbery face,' and I would say, 'You can't mean me!'
When I receive letters from girls that say, 'You give me confidence,' I think, 'Wow, this is amazing.' That's my goal: to let people know it's truly what's on the inside that counts.
I got a card in the mail from a close college friend saying that she was proud of me and what I've been doing. It was very sweet and honest. Nobody writes letters anymore, so when you get one in the mail, it feels very special.
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.'
Every cell in our body, whether it's a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a genome. You can extract that genome - it's kind of like a linear tape - and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell.
For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
I used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
The saddest moment as Prime Minister is writing letters to families who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan or those who we have tried to help in hostage situations but it hasn't worked out.
For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters' essential forms?
I get letters constantly from all over the world, telephone calls from America, Brazil, Australia, all over, especially on my birthday. A family? I have a huge international family. That's all I need.
I am definitely writing letters to lots of directors in my mind when I'm making a film. I'm chasing Woody Allen and Godard and Milos Forman and all these people.
I would always be embarrassed to read out loud in class because I would transpose words and letters and things.
A lot of vets like 'Good Morning Vietnam' - I get great letters from guys.
To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire - that is to give him a real moral strength.
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
I'd like to take a course in writing. I'm not the best writer in the world. I'd like to write more neatly, even though people don't send many handwritten letters these days.
People write me letters and say I should answer them. But I don't like to answer letters. I don't write letters. I've never written my mother one.
If I'm in a relationship, that girl gets showered with letters from the road. I pour my heart into it.
I don't know how to write love letters.
Stammering is different than stuttering. Stutterers have trouble with the letters, while stammerers trip over entire parts of a sentence. We stammerers generally think of ourselves as very bright.
One fan wrote asking for a very specific autographed photo. He wanted me to pose in tight jeans and boots and even enclosed a sketch of how I should dress! A lot of them just say they wish they had a girlfriend like me. They're very endearing letters.
Dad wouldn't let me fool with his guitar much, because I'm left-handed, and I'd pick it up upside down. But I remember learning to sing 'Paper Doll,' the Mills Brothers song - this was during the war - and I remember my dad taking me down to one of those little record booths where you could make spoken letters to send home.
In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.
I receive many letters from people hoping to research their own houses.
I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about.
Letters have been found with my name on assassination lists.
When I go in, I find that it is not a lab but an office. There are a pile of letters to answer, phone numbers to call up, people waiting to have an interview, routine work that must be done.
I've thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don't own the rights to the letters.
Listener and reader input is every bit as important as anything any of us can say. We'd be like crazy people chattering in the middle of that empty field that Joe Biden thinks we should stand in to be safe from swine flu if it weren't for the calls, the letters, the blogs, and the reaction from our audience.
At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails.
I'm the absolute worst at getting jobs, ever. I had 100 rejections before I landed one. I kept all the letters in a folder until I realized I could just chuck them away.
I get a lot of letters that say, 'I'm a normal, down-to-earth girl. I love to cook, and I love sports.' What I also get are letters from a whole bunch of moms saying, 'My daughter is awesome,' and, 'My daughter is a great daughter.'
I'm immensely proud to have been made a CBE, but I don't ever use the letters after my name unless someone has included them in correspondence.
I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that's partly my job this time around.