My favorite excerpt:

My choice is a famous sentence, that opening of Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. It reads:

It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened. Years ago, I relished it as a reader, but since I've come to admire it as a story writer. He was so smart to put so much in the bank with that sentence. It suggests the inventory that he'll draw from as the tale unfolds. He's rich. I also like that detail of the "double green fly of the dining tent," offering us the specific place, a real thing, the beginning of the grounding credibility which was so often the earmark and method of his work.