opening line to 'Consider Phlebas' Ian M Banks first foray in SF. Coincidentally, it seems to have upskittled Bob of this parish, I see elsewhere. Excellent book. Now, off you go, you have 3 months, please wriet on both sides of the paper.

from Jennifer Johnstone's peerless How Many Miles to Babylon...."Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper. So I write and wait. I am committed to no cause, I love no living person"..She expresses more in one sentence than most writers can manage in a whole book.

Boring, but the "all families...." beginning in Anna Karenina is memorable and I recall that the beginning of Hardy's Return of the Native with the description of Egdon Heath had me purring at the time, but cannot remember the exact words.

Good luck Jim.

"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him".

... might come from www.nanowrimo.org, or National Novel Writing Month. It's not until November, but it's designed to get people who "have a book inside them" to try and thrash it out in just 30 days. I did it myself some years back, and the forums have lots of advice, some as glib as "if you're stuck, write a dream sequence", but much of it very suitable from others trying exactly the same thing... good luck Jimmy!

PS since you ask, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

as a boy:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

The Catcher In The Rye - J D Salinger.

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

...Rocker43 will be the man to ask on this subject.

I have two unfinished novels. And I currently have no excuse not to do something about that.

Heads down and see you at the end, Jimmy! :-)

When did I last even read a novel...? I used to be voracious and now I just nibble. I'm ashamed to admit that I can barely even remember an opening line.

Anyway, very best of luck with the novel. Do keep at it, and don't end up like the man in the Barry Fantoni cartoon:
[two men at a party]
Man A: "I'm writing a novel"
Man B: "neither am I"

a dark and stormy night …

and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Orwell, 1984

This one - from Cormac McCarthy's The Road is almost unbearably poignant after you've read the book, though is pretty good first time as well:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

The first time Graham Hendrick watched his wife commit adultery he didn't mind at all. He even found himself chuckling. It never occurred to him to reach out a shielding hand towards his daughter's eyes.

.

they do things differently there.

(L. P. Hartley - The Go-Between).

Opening of Murther and Walking Spirits goes like this:

"I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead."

I've done nanowrimo twice, and enjoyed the challenge immensely. My first had a rather uninspiring opener, something along the lines of "OK, it really is recording this time." My second I was rather pleased with: "Hi, my name's Nick and I'm an arsehole."

PS: I'f you're doing the novel in a month, another top tip, if you're stuck, is to write a gratuitous sex scene.

... in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.

...I see from the BBC news site today that someone's unearthed Nobel Literature Prize-related papers from 1961 revealing that Tolkien was dismissed for his "second-rate story-telling".

Wonder how that call worked out for them in the long run...?

No arguments. So there.

(Moby-Dick, innit.)

on the edge of Barstow, when the drugs began to take a hold.

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold" - Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas

Biggles was whistling softly as he walked into the breakfast-room of his flat in Mount Street, but he broke off as he reached for the letters lying beside his plate.

Not content with being one of the Greatest Living Englishmen, a stellar actor, fine musician and all-round good egg, he also wrote a pretty impressive novel, The Gun Seller, which became a bestseller in France. It has a very arresting opening:

Imagine that you have to break someone's arm.

Right or left, doesn't matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don't...well, that doesn't matter either. Let's just say bad things will happen if you don't.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

It introduces that wholly original mixture of realism and wonder that made the book so original and entrancing (until about half-way through when his inspiration started going and it was like watching a balloon deflate).

so we refuse to take it tragically." (Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover)

without change in design, for a century."

Alistair Maclean: When Eight Bells Toll

Quite a number of these first lines are not being identified, and for those of us not particularly widely read it would be nice to know...

... that any discussion of great opening lines to a novel must contain the phrase "it is a truth universally acknowledged" somewhere within.

And I do think that that one is a genuine cracker of a scene setter as well.

A less obvious one which stuck with me is "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." JG Ballard High Rise

Another fave is the mighty Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. "Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade, but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."

... you beat me to the Ballard quote ;)

"An hour before he shot himself, my best friend Philip Strayhorn called to talk about thumbs."

to begin with.

...I love "Of Mice And Men":

"A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green."

I also love the opening line of "The Corrections", by Jonathan Franzen (but as it's pretty much my favourite novel by anyone, that's not surprisiing). I think it's because the story itself is, at root, so simple: a grandmother wants her grown family together for one last Christmas, while her husband slowly loses it to Parkinson's. The "terrible" things alluded to are actually so mundane, but it's their mundanity that makes them so terrible.

I adore this novel. I just... adore it. I read it at least once a year and it makes me cry every time, not just with its sadness, but with its beauty.

“The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it; something terrible was going to happen.”

and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous vermin."

There is some discussion about the precise translation of Kafka's opening line to Metamorphosis, but it's fair to say that Gregor's day doesn't get any better.

On the morning of the fourth day the view outside the hotel window had changed forever.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"

MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.

guessing opening sentences is a good game though:

In 1517, the Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, taking great pity on the Indians who were languishing in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines, suggested to Charles V, king of Spain, a scheme for importing blacks, so that they might languish in the hellish workpits of the Antillean gold mines.

There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off.

I have a story to tell you.

Early most mornings, Dave climbed up to this isolated spot on the hill and brought small offerings to leave in the shrine of St Clive, the patron saint of real-estate agents.

In Alice Springs – a grid of scorching streets where men in long, white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers – I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.

3 May. Bistritz.– Left Munich at 8.35pm on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late.

Any guesses?

that which begins A Tale of Two Cities ... but as that as already gone, here's another:

"It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills."

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep

The Hobbit

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole and that means comfort.

"You're wha`?" said Jimmy Rabbitte Sr.

Maybe not much linguistically but it throws you straight into the heart of the story.

Good call on the Gun Seller Rosbif. That was the one I could recall most clearly as I was scrolling down the page. Not a great book but a cracking first page.

"You've killed my monkey!" said Dave.

The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Begins

"In the hilly South African province of Natal, a lovely road winds its way up from the village of Ixopo to Carisbrooke, a journey of seven miles. This misty vantage point looks out over one of the fairest valleys of Africa, where the native birds sing and the grass is dense and green. The lush grass of the hills clings to the rain and mist, soaking up the moisture, which in turn feeds every stream. Although cattle graze here, their feeding has not destroyed the land, and the few fires that burn have not harmed the soil. As the hills roll down to the valley below, however, they become red and bare. The grass there has been destroyed by cattle and fire, and the streams have all run dry. When storms come, the red dirt runs like blood, and the crops are withered and puny. These valleys are the homes of the elderly, who scrape at the dirt for sustenance. Some mothers live here with their children, but all the able-bodied young people have long since moved away"

"Oh my" gasped Mrs Brooke, rubbing her eyes in disbelief, "Didn't you used to be my husband Ernest?"

"The man in black rode across the desert and the gunslinger followed him."

In one sentence he introduces a villain (the man), the setting (somewhere where people ride horses and there are gunslingers), a location (the desert) and the hero. And from there it just gets better and better. It also includes a beautiful set of dying words from one person to his friend: "Go then, there are other worlds than this." You'll have to read it for the full weight of that to hit home, but I've always remembered that bit.

I'm coming to the end of writing chapter 12 of my own magnum opus (about 2/3 of the way through) and I must say that I thought long and hard about the opening line and I'm still unsure if it's the right one. However, I do dream of grateful readers stopping me in the street to say, "That opening? It's a belter." We'll see...

I can see the world"

(The opening line from a novel I've yet to write.)

It's three sentences I know but I've always loved this opening particularly given what follows it:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

As indeed are most of the sentences between.

Mason & Dixons opens with this:

"Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware, — the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar, — the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults."

(From previous threads, it seems Pynchon is not too popular around these parts - you either like this sort of thing or you don't, I guess. This is just a winter scene - kids throw snowballs at walls and relatives, then sneak into the kitchen for treats - not really pretentious or highbrow at all.)

Timothy Mo gives us this intriguing, though fairly disgusting, opening sentence to "Brown-out on Breadfruit Boulevard":

"When the shower of shit, which he welcomed, spattered over his chest and belly Professor Pfeidwengeler was thinking about his worst enemy, Dr. Ruth Neumark."

(it's the "which he welcomed" that makes it work)

Iain Sinclair has this curious opener to "Downriver":
"'And what,' Sabella insisted, 'is the opposite of a dog?'"

"Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tyre tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face"

...Moore/Gibbons/Higgins - The Watchmen

"Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-from high flat temples-in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan. He said to Effie Perine: "Yes, sweetheart?"

Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one."

Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye

"James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death."

Ian Fleming - Goldfinger

"'I wonder,' said Little John, shading his eyes with his hand as he stared out to the horizon, 'if you could reach England by swimming there?'
'Probably,' said the Legionnaire, sounding bored.
'If you were a fish,' added the Old Man."

Sven Hassell - Liquidate Paris

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

By William Kennedy Graham

"It wasn't that Antonia disliked Jane, but she talked of nothing but figs."

In the spring of 1989, shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday, as I stood in the sleet at a bus-stop in Colchester, it dawned on me that I had probably, all things considered, failed in my mission to become Sting.

... he knew he would never be a Great Actress.

The first line of Rupert Everett's otherwise dreadful novel Hello Darling, Are You Working?.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. (Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez.)

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
(The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams)

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. (The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
(A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens)

A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys. Over the main entrance the words “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” and, in a shield, the World State's Motto: “Community, Identity, Stability”. (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley)

"There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual"
(Barbara Pym - No Fond Return of Love)

"Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle"

(Jeanette Winterson - Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit)

and the word was made flesh.

I don't believe in God but The Bible is a bloody good compendium of books, the best of which is Matthew's Gospel.

"It was a bright cold day in April,and the clocks were striking thirteen." Edit: Sorry missed the above post..worth another mention anyway...lol

A whole first paragraph, but it's worth it, I think:

It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I would up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death. I had met her by chance only a short time before, but eventually I came to see that chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life.

...started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined from the first word that came from the stranger's mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.

Paul Auster, City of Glass, the first of the New York Trilogy

I'm not sure what my memory does for a living, but it's definitely not retaining the first, second or last lines of novels that I have read (or, unfortunately, any of the lyrics to my favourite songs).
I believe its official work title should be Keeper of Vague Recollections That Probably Aren't Very Accurate Anyway.
Now, I'm sure quite a few of you had to look up the exact quotes...but just remembering that there was a good quote to look up in the first place is impressive to me and my KOVRTPAVAA.
After reading this thread I sat down and thought very hard about all the novels that I have read in my life, my favourite books in particular, but I couldn't remember how any of them started.
No, I lie.
There is ONE novel that I do remember the first lines from, because a) I read it a hundred times as a child, and b) my brother and I would often quote them for comic effect in and out of context.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

"TOM!"
No answer.
"TOM!"
No answer.

Actually, that's not a bad start. And the chapter it begins is one of the funniest ever written.
(Well done, KOVRTPAVAA!)

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

Have you written a précis of your novel yet? Care to share?

everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."

The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien - a masterpiece that you can read again and again, which is the case with all his books.

“A screaming came across the sky.”
Pynchon – Gravity's Rainbow

And the LAST line is a cracker, too:

"Now everybody”

I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.
- Unreliable Memoirs, Clive James

Great thread, Jimmy, and a Massive group hug for rising typically to the task.

"They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming."

Doesn't get any better than that, baby.

"The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all."

Brilliant opening, so many unanswered questions in one sentence you have to read on.

"The sweat wis lashing offay Sickboy" 'nuff said. Oh, nearly forgot,

"Gabriel Santee was seventeen years old and three months pregnant when she married "Sonic Johnny" Makhurst, a Boeing test pilot and recent heir to a modest Ohio hardware fortune." Fup by Jim Dodge, he says more in the first paragraph than some authors have put into entire novels.

unwritten fictional account of the life of a cantankerous irish musician

'Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum. The two-story log doghouse was supposedly a replica of a frontier fort. He and Karla had bought it at a home show in Fort Worth on a day when they were bored. It would have housed several Great Danes comfortably, but so far had housed nothing. Shorty, the only dog Duane could put up with, never went near it.'

I just had to keep reading

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."