While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.
Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.
For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

the french ambassador to spain, meeting cervantes,congratulated him on the great success and reputation gained by his "don quixote"; whereupon the author whispered in his ear: "had it not been for the inquisition, i should have made my book much more entertaining.

Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.