The success of a book is not measured by the length of its opening sentence

Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities begins, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” (120 words)

Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care begins, “You know more than you think you do.” (8 words)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick begins, “Call me Ishmael.” (3 words)

My favorite opening sentence is the one in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violet Bear It Away. It is a happy medium of 88 words that practically drag the reader into the story and dare him or her not to read more: “Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Savior at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.”

Some people have called O’Connor’s writing grotesque. She famously said: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”