Preface quotes & poetry

[howeird]

Some of the books and short stories I've read have a quote or a snippet of a poem just before the story starts, put there by the author as a sort of mini-preface. About 75% of the time, the quote is not familiar to me, 90% of the time it does nothing to tweak my brain in the direction the story is going to lead, and 99% of the time it's more distracting than anything. The remaining 1% of the time it's either from Lewis Carroll or Mark Twain. :-)

Comments?

I'm especially interested in hearing from published writers why they do or don't follow this tradition.