"I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same."
— Dai Sijie (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel)

"In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was."
— Dai Sijie (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel)

""To me it was the ultimate book: once you read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.""
— Dai Sijie

"I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland."
— Dai Sijie (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel)

"The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand-and-One-Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers — more's the pity."
— Dai Sijie (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel)

"Often, after extinguishing the oil lamp in our house on stilts, we would lie on our beds and smoke in the dark. Book titles poured from our lips, the mysterious and exotic names evoking unknown worlds. It was like Tibetan incense, where you need only say the name, Zang Xiang, to smell the subtle, refined fragrance and to see the joss sticks sweating beads of scented moisture which, in the lamplight, resemble drops of liquid gold."
— Dai Sijie (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel)