A few weeks ago, my ex-colleague, Boris Kachka, wrote that Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World had the year's best first sentence in a novel: “You know how it ends: Everybody dies.”
Because the title of my novel is AND THEY ALL DIE IN THE END, I'm collecting references that remind me of it, for some yet unspecified purpose. (Know of any? Email me at espiers AT earthlink dot net.)
I just ran across another last night, while reading Julian Barnes' Love, Etc.:
Stuart: I read more than I used to. Non-fiction. History, science, biography. I like to know that what I'm being told is true. From time to time I'll read a novel, if there's one people are going on about. But stories aren't enough like life for me. In stories, someone gets married and that's the ending—well, I can tell you from my own personal experience that this isn't the case. In life, every ending is just the start of another story. Except when you die—that's an ending that's really an ending. I suppose if novels were true to life, they'd all end with the characters dying,, but if they did, we wouldn't want to read them, would we?Posted by espiers at January 2, 2006 11:30 PM