... a pre-war travel book.

My friend and interpreter was there, but the president spoke enough English to make conversation very difficult.

—Evelyn Waugh, When The Going Was Good, "Globe-Trotting in 1930–1," p. 139 (of 298). A perfect sentence.

... a crappy afterword.

[The beginning and ending of The Great Gatsby are] lauded as examples of superb writing. Every word is filled with meaning and substance, laden with implication yet as light as ether; and when you reach out to grasp one, it slips through your fingers ...

Like a fairy-tale beanstalk, [Fitzgerald’s words] soar endlessly into the air, carrying the reader with them. Each word gives birth to the next in a single, ascending stream. Searching for space to grow, they spread out until they cover the sky ... Words are sucked upward with their ambiguities and multiple meanings intact, so that they bulge with implications and possibilities ...

[Readers] naturally apprehend what Fitzgerald is doing, for the writing is of unparalleled beauty, and the resonance of his language leaves nothing unsaid. This, I guess, is what literary genius is all about.

—Haruki Murakami, translator’s afterword to his The Great Gatsby, translated into English by Ted Goossen in In Translation: Translators on their work and what it means, Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, eds.

Clearly, the worst writing being perpetrated in any language is that of blurb writing: highfalutin and utterly vacuous. (This being, in effect, an extended blurb intended for publication between the covers instead of on them.)

... a preface.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means preoccupation; and the preoccupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired. To people who are not overworked, holidays are a nuisance. A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

—George Bernard Shaw, "Parents and Children," preface to "Misalliance."

... a novel.

Now Cooper’s face, though it did not seem to move a muscle, brought together and threw off in a single grimace the finest shades of irresolution, revulsion, doglike devotion, catlike discretion, fatigue, hunger, thirst and reserves of strength, in a very small fraction of the time that the finest oratory would require for a greatly inferior evasion, and without exposing its proprietor to misquotation.

—Samuel Beckett, Murphy, chapter 10.