“I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things – you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw – it's part of the novel's richness: its length, multiplicity of aspects, and shapelessness resemble the length and shapelessness of life itself. By the time you reach the end of the novel you will have forgotten the beginning and much of what happens in between: not the main outlines but the fine work, the detail and the music of the sentences – the particular words, through which the novel has its life. You think you know a novel so well that there must be nothing left in it to discover but the last time I reread Emma I found a little shepherd boy, brought into the parlour to sing for Harriet when she's staying with the Martin family. I'm sure he was never in the book before.”

“To me reading is an almost sacred activity and the great novel is its high mass.The novel is so deeply powerful as an art form because of the investment of time and faith it demands. A good novel can sweep you up, quarry you out, illuminate you and truly inhabit your life. And, of course, although the writer composes the sentences of the novel the reader is a full participant in the imaginative process and far from a mere voyeur.”

“In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical centre of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post—I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.”

“I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible--well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones--and will reread something she's already read, even if it's something like a detective novel, when you'd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn't, and besides, I often can't remember who the murderer was in the first place.)”

“I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”

“...the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels, Indian novels. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time.”