“A more profound and powerful work than this is not to be met with...The final and greatest utterance of the human mind.”

“One of the best-loved novels of all time, Don Quixote was intended to be a satire on the exaggerated chivalric romances of Cervantes’ time. However, the author soars above this purpose in his wealth of fancy and in his irrepressible high spirit.”

“Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’ womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality…He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.”

“Don Quixote is the first modern novel, perhaps the most eternal novel ever written and certainly the fountainhead of European and American fiction: here we have Gogol and Dostoevsky, Dickens and Nabokov, Borges and Bellow, Sterne and Diderot in their genetic nakedness, once more taking to the road with the gentleman and the squire, believing the world is what we read and discovering that the world reads us.”

“What a monument is this book! How its creative genius, critical, free, and human, soars above its age!”

“Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era…The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being, and yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?”

“The highest creation of genius has been achieved by Shakespeare and Cervantes, almost alone.”

“Don Quixote, famously, is the first major work of Western literature to take ordinary human life for its subject—specifically, a life that is replete with accidents, fiascoes, and indignities—and make it over into something luminous with meaning. It does so without pomp or sententiousness—it’s the friendliest and least formal of all the Great Books—yet will overwhelm you, in the end, with its moral and imaginative splendor.”