Lectures on Don Quixote Quotes

“We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator’s desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought—and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote

“We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called "real life" in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction.
... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote

“We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called "real life" in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fictions of facts with the facts of fiction.
... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote