It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.

What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.