Don Quixote
And what should we say about the queen or empress who so readily puts herself in the arms of an unknown knight errant? What imagination—unless it’s one that is barbarian and uncultured—can be entertained reading that a huge tower filled with knights, sets sail as if it were a ship with a favorable wind stopping tonight in Lombardy, and at daybreak it’s in the land of Prester John of the Indies, or in some country not discovered by Ptolemy or seen by Marco Polo. And if you tell me that those books were written as fiction so their authors don’t have to pay strict attention to the fine points, or the way things really are, I’d respond that fiction is better the more it resembles the truth, and it’s more delightful the more it has of what is truthful and possible. Fictional tales must be wedded to the understanding of the reader, and written in such a way that impossible things seem possible, excesses are smoothed over, and the mind is kept in suspense, so that they astonish, stimulate, delight, and entertain us in such a way that admiration and pleasure move together; and the person who flees from credibility and imitation—of which perfection in what one writes consists—cannot accomplish this.
