Joe Fassler, writing for The Atlantic, asked several authors about their favorite opening lines in books:
When I interviewed Stephen King for the By Heart series, he told me about some of his favorite opening lines in literature. Then, the author had an off-the-cuff idea.
“You could go around and ask people about their favorite first lines,” he said. “I think you’ll find that most of them, right away, establish the sense of voice we talked about. Why not do it? I’d love to know, like, Jonathan Franzen’s favorite first line.”
So I reached out to Franzen and 21 other writers. In honor of King’s new novel Joyland and its nouveau-pulp publisher Hard Case Crime, there are a good number of crime writers featured in this list. Other writers I spoke to don’t write crime fiction at all, preferring to focus on other brands of human mystery. Collected below, the opening lines they picked range widely in tone and execution–but in each, you can almost feel the reader’s mind beginning to listen, hear the inward swing of some inviting door.
There are so many great introductory passages throughout literature. One that came to mind is from “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon. I think I like it because it gets right to the point:
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead.