Maybe there should be a contest to turn great first sentences into Lyton worthy bad sentences.

The man in Black ambulated with passion across the Desert, and the Gunslinger said I'm gonna do that too.

My given appellation, which I hereby grant permission to you and any other interested parties to use when speaking in reference to me, is Ishmael.

It was the best of times--no, wait, the worst--well, maybe both at the same time.

Everyone knows rich single dudes wanna get hitched.

At 13:00 hrs the weather was normal for April.

In an office, I was seated, looking around at what I saw only as the heads and bodies of the people all around me.

The Book, Alpha 0: The Entity created everythingness from nondescript nothingness, and as with contemporary cosmology, this was as good a place to start as any other. A place for life.

This feels spectacularly Pratchett-esque. I would not be surprised to see this as the first sentence of a Discworld novel :P

Who's gonna break the news?

Hey now, don't make me sad. In my heart I still like to pretend that Discworld will always have more books to read :'(

I don’t think anything’s ever going to beat Thompson’s “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold”

And we'll need the cocaine

I don't understand why that sentence is always mentioned as a notably good opening sentence on its own. If it wasn't written by Steven King in a book that's considered to be good, would anyone really identify the sentence itself as a great opening sentence? Of course I don't think there's anything wrong with it as an opening sentence, I just don't see how it's notable.

I fed that sentence to GPT-2 last month. Brilliant:

The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed. There was talk of trying to track down a mysterious man who, if not a gun, could be a helpful ally. For a moment, the two could not be sure. The Man in Black was not the same man they had met at the end of the night. But he could be a friend.

As the Man went through the desert and into the darkness of the unknown, he left the gunslinger behind. The gunslinger was in the middle of a trail of shattered bricks. The Man went away.

"Man in Black," said the Gunslinger.

"Gunslinger," said the Man in Black.