Books Quote by E. Nesbit

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.

— Malcolm Lowry

Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost.

— Sarah Josepha Hale

“Albert's uncle says I ought to have put this in the preface, but I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing…

— E. Nesbit

The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.

— Philip Guedalla

The preface? Why would he waste time with the preface? Skip the preface and move on to the meat of the thing!

— Kenneth Oppel

A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical.

— Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Avoid Prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.

— Elmore Leonard

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because…

— James Frey

My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual…

— Daniel Handler

Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

— Fernando Pessoa

Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

— Henry Miller