Book Introduction Quotes

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

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that's what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample.

How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it's your book that's coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

This book, "Speaking Freely," starts when I came to New York. And the first chapter is about a man who became a friend of mine, much to our mutual surprise, Malcolm X.

And out of the blue, I got a call from an editor friend at Knopf and she said that they were interested in putting out an update for their vintage paperback line. So I was more than thrilled and it was suggested that perhaps I could do a 1,000 word new introduction covering what's happened with the whole Warhol thing since 1990 when the first edition hardcover came out and, uh, that was about August 1st and I sat down at my computer here in East Hampton and on on August 30th I'd written almost 10,000 words!

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

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

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

As I point out in the very first pages of 'Into the Wild,' I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist.

nobody ever wrote to me saying"you know ender's game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs a n introduction!".....so be assured the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, i not only won't stand in your way i'll even agree with you!