I too will quote a short paragraph.
As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels. He followed me through the door leading to Customs, Health, and Immigration. As the door contracted behind him I killed him.
Robert Heinlein, Friday
From one of my favourite authors…
“It was a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.”
Roger Zelazny - Trumps of Doom
Snoopy writing his great novel. Of course it starts, “It was a dark and stormy night.” 
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
Iain Banks. The Crow Road.
“He was 170 days dying but not yet dead.” – Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
“Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette unsupported hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.” – “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison
Guys! “Not Long Before the End” and “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” are two different stories.
In “Not Long Before the End”, the Warlock fights against a barbarian and a magic sword.
In “What Good is a Glass Dagger?”, The Warlock and his werewolf sidekick fight against the magician Wavyhill, who dabbles in illusion, necromancy, and mass murder.
If I remember right, Stainless Steel Rat’s quote is from “Not Long Before the End”. But I could be wrong.
“When I was nine years old I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king.” Quest for a Maid, by Frances Mary Hendry.
“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.” Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve.
Yes, “A swordsman battled a sorcerer once not long before the end” is the opening of “Not Long Before the End” - “What Good is a Glass Dagger” takes place some decades later, and opens with the werewolf being caught sneaking into Warlock’s home (there’s no swordsman in it).
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
–H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
So very Victorian.
“The last camel collapsed at noon.” Ken Follett, Key to Rebecca.
What…do you think “the droghte of March” is?
“This is the saddest story I ever heard.”
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford. (Originally titled The Saddest Story.)
I guess if one starts reading the sample on Amazon, and looks up ten minutes later wanting more, it’s time to buy.
Thanks! 
I find it hard to believe that nobody has posted this yet: the first 2 sentences of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."
Also a brilliant bit of foreshadowing. For the transient creatures are what kills the Martians.