Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'
The great thing about rock n' roll is, if you want to fight - like, fight the system, fight the man, fight the government, fight the people in front of you - it's Don Quixote all over again. You're really chasing windmills.
As far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know. Single handed, he is trying to change the world, regardless of any personal consequences.
I, like Don Quixote, have fought many a windmill.
I don't remember much about the specifics of the economics courses that I majored in - I apparently internalized the key concepts - but I still remember vividly the thrill of reading 'Don Quixote,' Epictetus, 'The Aeneid,' 'King Lear' and 'Candide,' and how contemporary the stories and ideas in these old and ancient texts struck me.
I've always wanted to play Don Quixote in some way. It's a great role. I think the idealism of the man shows that hope that we have in the human breast to achieve something.
The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain.
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
I don't despise 'Don Quixote,' but it is a book I don't... get. I'll have to come back it. Maybe there'll be a gateway story that opens it up for me; that happened for me with 'Paradise Lost' and the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy.
