“To read Hotel Angeline is to celebrate how this diverse group of writers (and readers, all of them) can pool their talents and expertise to come up with such an entertaining and soul-satisfying novel.”

“I often hear people say that they read to escape reality, but I believe that what they’re really doing is reading to find reason for hope, to find strength. While a bad book leaves readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair, a good novel, through stories of values realized, of wrongs righted, can bring to readers a connection to the wonder of life. A good novel shows how life can and ought to be lived. It not only entertains but energizes and uplifts readers.”

“My priority as a writer is that my reader's entertainment comes first, second, and last.”

“Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.”

“I can't believe how many students don't read. They want to be writers, but they haven't read anything at all. They have looked at book covers, which usually allows them enough expertise to sneer, but they haven't read the books. How many young poets "don't like" poetry? How many fiction writers don't know Lehane from Nevada Barr?”

“He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.”