100 Best First Lines From Novels

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From Gordon Dryden, Auckland:
Great list. But here are some of my other favourites:

The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Click. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty. — Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run (1941).

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and the hard look of wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, clack brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was near, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. — Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939).

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. — Thornton Wilder, The Bridge Over the San Luis Rey.

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.” Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior.

It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. — Frederick Forsyth, The Day Of The Jackal.

Some of these are from Stein On Writing, by Sol Stein: for my money, still the best book on writing both fiction and nonfiction.

And if you want to recall why and how Alistair Cooke was the master for-radio writer of all time, here is the opening sentence to his BBC Letter from America on February 1, 1963:

It was a splendid day in Vermont when they buried Robert Frost, the sky without a cloud, the light from the white landscape making every elm and barn as sharp as a blade, and the people crunching quietly through the deep snow and squinting into the enormous sun.

Any nominations for a New Zealand novel?