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 had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.