from publishingperspectives.com
It was Norman Mailer, I believe, who wrote that you can judge a novel by its opening lines, since, in his opinion, those were the ones that the author puts the most work into. (Some of my favorite openers? “This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” from Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and “I get the willies when I see closed doors,” from Joseph Heller’s Something Happened.)
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