Ask any writer you know, all of them will probably admit their biggest struggle is finding the right first sentences of books. Sometimes it’s easier to draft an entire story and actually write a nice ending paragraph before deciding on the good starting sentences of their pieces.
The beginning of a story carries the daunting task of hooking the prospective reader in, and adding your work among best selling books. You get only a few sentences and maybe less than two minutes to write good opening lines which will pass the vibe check between the reader and the book. If you’re an inspiring writer, our list of 83 famous opening lines of books will show you how to write books that grab attention from the beginning.
In a recent survey from Amazon Literary Partnership, British book lovers voted for the timeless French Revolution-era classic novel “A Tale of Two Cities,” published in 1840. Charles Dickens wrote the most iconic novel opening that still wins in polls:
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”
Scroll through our list with literary masterpieces and the best books of all time if you want to become the next Charles Dickens who writes the best opening sentences. Be sure to let us know which book you didn’t judge by its cover, but by its opening lines. And if you haven’t laid your eyes on any of these books, you will definitely pick your next read here.
#1 ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ By Douglas Adams
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#2 ‘The Martian’ By Andy Weir
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#3 ‘Fahrenheit 451’ By Ray Bradbury
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#4 ‘1984’ By George Orwell
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#5 ‘Anna Karenina’ By Leo Tolstoy
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#6 ‘The Great Gatsby’ By F. Scott Fitzgerald
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#7 ‘Middlesex’ By Jeffrey Eugenides
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#8 ‘The Go-Between’ By L.P. Hartley
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#9 ‘The Princess Bride’ By William Goldman
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#10 ‘The Crow Road’ By Iain Banks
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#11 ‘Pride And Prejudice’ By Jane Austen
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#12 ‘Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone’ By J.K. Rowling
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#13 ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’ By Charles Dickens
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#14 ‘Peter Pan’ By J.M. Barrie
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#15 ‘The Metamorphosis’ By Franz Kafka
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#16 ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ By Zora Neale Hurston
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#17 ‘A Frolic Of His Own’ By William Gaddis
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#18 ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ By Diana Wynne Jones
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#19 ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ By Kurt Vonnegut
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#20 ‘The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe’ By Douglas Adams
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#21 ‘The Hobbit’ By J.R.R. Tolkien
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#22 ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ By J.D. Salinger
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#23 ‘Back When We Were Grownups’ By Anne Tyler
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#24 ‘Waiting’ By Ha Jin
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#25 ‘Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland’ By Lewis Carroll
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#26 ‘The Color Purple’ By Alice Walker
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#27 ‘Lolita’ By Vladimir Nabokov
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#28 ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’ By Gabriel García Márquez
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#29 ‘Middle Passage’ By Charles R. Johnson
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#30 ‘Scaramouche: A Romance Of The French Revolution’ By Rafael Sabatini
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#31 ‘Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale’ By Herman Melville
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#32 ‘Chromos’ By Felipe Alfau
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#33 ‘Tracks’ By Robyn Davidson
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#34 ‘David Copperfield’ By Charles Dickens
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#35 ‘Notes From Underground’ By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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#36 ‘The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ By Laurence Sterne
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#37 ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea’ By Jules Verne
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#38 ‘The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn’ By Mark Twain
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#39 ‘Charlotte’s Web’ By E.B. White
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#40 ‘Goodbye To Berlin’ By Christopher Isherwood
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#41 ‘Breakfast Of Champions’ By Kurt Vonnegut
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#42 ‘The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader’ By C. S. Lewis
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#43 ‘The Trial’ By Franz Kafka
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#44 ‘Don Quixote’ By Miguel De Cervantes
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#45 ‘Gone With The Wind’ By Margaret Mitchell
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#46 ‘Murphy’ By Samuel Beckett
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#47 ‘The Stranger’ By Albert Camus
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#48 ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ By Ken Kesey
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#49 ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’ By Hunter S. Thompson
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#50 ‘Neuromancer’ By William Gibson
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#51 ‘The Bell Jar’ By Sylvia Plath
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#52 ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ By Arthur C. Clarke
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#53 ‘Paradise’ By Toni Morrison
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#54 ‘Jane Eyre’ By Charlotte Brontë
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#55 ‘The Outsiders’ By S.E. Hinton
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#56 ‘A Clockwork Orange’ By Anthony Burgess
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#57 ‘The End Of The Affair’ By Graham Greene
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#58 ‘City Of Glass’ By Douglas Coupland
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#59 ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ By Harper Lee
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#60 ‘The Hunger Games’ By Suzanne Collins
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#61 ‘And Then There Were None’ By Agatha Christie
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#62 ‘Life Of Pi’ By Yann Martel
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#63 ‘High-Rise’ By J.G. Ballard
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#64 ‘A River Runs Through It’ By Norman Maclean
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#65 ‘The Portrait Of A Lady’ By Henry James
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#66 ‘I Capture The Castle’ By Dodie Smith
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#67 ‘The Napoleon Of Notting Hill’ By G. K. Chesterton
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#68 ‘Changing Places: A Tale Of Two Campuses’ By David Lodge
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#69 ‘The Invisible Man’ By H.G. Wells
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#70 ‘The Brief History Of The Dead’ By Kevin Brockmeier
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#71 ‘Oryx And Crake’ By Margaret Atwood
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#72 ‘Elmer Gantry’ By Sinclair Lewis
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#73 ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ By Ernest Hemingway
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#74 ‘Catch-22’ By Joseph Heller
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#75 ‘The Pearl’ By John Steinbeck
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#76 ‘Cat’s Eye’ By Margaret Atwood
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#77 ‘The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe’ By C.S. Lewis
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#78 ‘A Confederacy Of Dunces’ By John Kennedy Toole
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#79 ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ By Jean Rhys
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#80 ‘Middlemarch’ By George Eliot
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#81 ‘Ethan Frome’ By Edith Wharton
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#82 ‘Goldfinger’ By Ian Fleming
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#83 ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ By Thomas Pynchon
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