You know, I said I have this problem that I need to more carefully read Akron's text because it's too much, too much fantasy, and so I am busy with other stuff - it's funny, it's nice to hear that someone is studying that carefully and now I know a little bit more about that.

Tone can be as important as text.

The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us 'on pause' in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations 'on pause' when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call.

You may feel that Peter Martins' 'Beauty' is too compressed and inexpressive, but it's loyal to the text.

For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.

These 'free' applications ask for permission to read your emails, your text messages, listen to your phone calls, record video from your phone. Why else would someone spend millions developing an application which they then give away? Kind-hearted, maybe? Get real.

I'm trying to stay focused on what I'm doing. I don't want a whole lot of things going on - people to call back, or text messages or whatever. I chill out, relax a little bit, and then I don't have those issues.

My husband doesn't text... It's always phone calls. I like that because you hear the voice the old-fashioned way.

Compare sending someone a text message and getting a love letter delivered by carrier pigeon. No contest.

I've got corporate executives, my bosses... this is true... who will text message me... and say, 'Hey a, heard you had chemotherapy today, want me to stop by and pick you up something to eat and bring it to you?' Whose boss does that? My bosses do that.

Deep reading refers to a whole continuum of processes that include some of the most important things about thinking and how we connect thought to what we read - critical analysis, analogical reasoning, how we infer from the text, how do we take another's perspective.

It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call.' Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.'

I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.

We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.

I like, for instance, 'Serpico.' I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could - I could embody him. I could, you know, I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It's almost like a painter having a model to become.

There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.

When I preaches, I has just one text to preach from, an' I always preaches from this one. My text is, 'When I found Jesus.'

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

'Roots' was a massive responsibility because it is this foundational text in the States and it also resonates fairly strongly with pretty much any black community globally.

If you are lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call them. Don't text; don't e-mail. Call them on the phone.