In an interview with recently deceased author Paul Auster, he says the following:

When I was 9 or 10, my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: “In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.”

This encouraged me to browse my bookshelf and search for those scintillating first sentences. As it turns out, many of the books that I loved the most really do pack a punch before the end of their first paragraph. Here’s my personal selection. Unlike Auster’s example, the ones I am sharing do not immediately drop you in the middle of the action, as the number of adventure books on my bookshelf is marginal. However, I do feel they capture a lot about the protagonist and set the tone for the novel.

I would love for you to share yours.

The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster:

I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain.

Moon Palace by Paul Auster:

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.

The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, 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 Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs

When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus.