What's your favourite first line?

Got to be 'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen' for me.

(1984, George Horatio Orwell)

"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirty anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone and we are dead."

-- TROPIC OF CANCER - Henry Miller

"Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grave of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?"

LOVE IN THE RUINS, Walker Percy

Another favourite, courtesy of Anthony Burgess.

"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."

From EARTHLY POWERS.

"It was a pleasure to burn."

~ FAHRENHEIT 451, Ray Bradbury