“She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.”

“[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.”

“Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.”

“Not a single sentence could move her heart. Not a story, a novel or even a poem. Even if she really had a heart, she could not love.”

“the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.”

“That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.”

“I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.”

“My one abiding principle has been to translate everything – even puns. For although this is… an 'unfinished' novel, it was written (and rewritten) by a great artist with his very lifeblood. I have therefore assumed that whatever I find in it is there for a purpose and must be dealt with somehow or other. I cannot pretend always to have done so successfully, but if I can convey to the reader even a fraction of the pleasure this Chinese novel has given me, I shall not have lived in vain.”

“She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy”