Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.
When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
Menopause. A pause while you reconsider men.
Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.