Preface Quotes

“PREFACE PROBLEM: Nobody reads prefaces.SOLUTION: Call the preface Chapter 1.NEW PROBLEM CREATED BY SOLUTION: Chapter 1 is boring.RESOLUTION: Throw away Chapter 1 and call Chapter 2 Chapter 1.”

“I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.”

“ What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death. I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.”

“we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particularway in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.”

“In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.”

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

“[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.”

“ I write for the beauty of the printed word"from PREFACE to BIPOLAR BUFFALO”

“too much explanation can take the pleasure out of any poetry.(Preface, vii)”