Tristram Shandy turned 250 this week. Consider this a roast of sorts.
"Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."- Samuel Johnson
"The man Sterne is worth 1000 Pedants and commonplace-place fellows like Dr. J[ohnson]."- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature."- Viktor Shklovsky
Tristram Shandy is the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century."- Italo Calvino
"[I]t is my best text."- Javier Marias, on his translation of Tristram Shandy into Spanish
Tristram Shandy is "the best Book, that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty Years, bad as it is."
- David Hume