For a man that never wanted to be born, Tristram Shandy has aged quite well.

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