Explore First sentence
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Ann Beattie | First Sentence
Ann Beattie
‘Several times I’ve wanted to title something one thing, but have realized or been persuaded it isn’t a good idea.’
Mona Simpson | First Sentence
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
Héctor Abad | First Sentence
Héctor Abad
‘Ever since this happened to me, I haven’t really believed in free will.’
Yiyun Li | First Sentence
Yiyun Li
‘But for her, and perhaps for many, the solidity of an invented life is not trustworthy.’
Anjali Joseph | First Sentence
Anjali Joseph
‘I kept returning to the Beckett stories, a favourite since I came upon them in my late teens.’
Patrick French | First Sentence
Patrick French
‘In Edwardian days, if you were growing up in England (though Maurice was from Ireland) your life was regimented.’
Laura Kasischke | First Sentence
Laura Kasischke
‘There really was a moth I found in a toolbox (not as musical or interesting as ‘strongbox’), alive, in the attic, in that box.’
Hero of Tiananmen Square
Orville Schell
‘The spring of 1989 was so apocalyptic that at the time it had seemed unthinkable that the year's events would fade or that China would ever be able to forget them.'
Toh EnJoe | First Sentence
Toh EnJoe
‘I think that the thing called thought can be viewed as rooted in the very real phenomenon of neurons firing.’
Miroslav Penkov | First Sentence
Miroslav Penkov
‘It was an old woman’s racism that inspired the first line of ‘Blood Money’.’
Melinda Moustakis | First Sentence
Melinda Moustakis
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’
