Three Novels Quotes

#1. You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

Chad Harbach

#2. I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.

Ayelet Waldman

#3. The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with 'Brisk Money' as the origin story.

Adam Christopher

#4. I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.

Neil Jordan

#5. I can write three novels in the time it takes to write one novella. I'm probably not going to go with that form again.

Nathan Lowell

#6. I picked up 'The Hunger Games' thinking it was written at my regressed reading level. I've spent hours reading it, and I'm not even halfway through. Our bass player, whose name is also Nate, ended up reading all three novels and loved them.

Nate Ruess

#7. After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.

Nicholas Mosley

#8. Rejection is part of the process, so you can't let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, 'Sheltering Rain,' was translated into 11 languages.

Jojo Moyes

#9. You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist.

Michael Kroft

#10. Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.

Mervyn Peake

#11. The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

Peter Straub

#12. I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

Edmund White

#13. Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#14. Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

Kate Atkinson

#15. My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

Philipp Meyer

#16. I like Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels - Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig - invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn't do the job they had in mind.

William Zinsser

#17. I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.

Anatole Broyard

#18. Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

Colm Toibin

#19. Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina when asked the three best novels of all time.

William Faulkner

#20. My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

Umberto Eco

#21. All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

Christina Stead

#22. I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.

Jim Crace

#23. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn't possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us.

Oscar Wilde

#24. The story of Harold Fry and his unlikely pilgrimage began as an afternoon play for radio. For many years, I have been writing plays and adapting novels for 'Woman's Hour' and the 'Classic' series. So this was originally a three-hander play, broadcast one sunny afternoon on BBC Radio 4.

Rachel Joyce

#25. I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I'm smart because I'm reading a certain book.

Chris Abani

#26. Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?

Geraldine Brooks

#27. ...After you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter.

Pierre Louis

#28. When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

Jon Scieszka

#29. When you're doing characters from famous novels, you have a responsibility as an actor to make it what the writer intended. And then you add and expand from there to create a three-dimensional performance.

David Suchet

#30. I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

Tom Perrotta

#31. I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.

Dan Chaon

#32. It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Don DeLillo

#33. But it was so much more. In that white blouse you wore, you looked like Grace Kelly, sharing a joke with a schnauzer, then you smiled at me and i was included, the three of us alone together. I thought, there's a woman I could die for.

Phillipa Fioretti

#34. I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.

William Gibson

#35. The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

Fernando Pessoa

#36. The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.

David Guterson

#37. Stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

Stephen King

#38. Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day ... and rightly so.

Sue Grafton

#39. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

Stephen Graham Jones

#40. I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.

Joe R. Lansdale

#41. Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.

Patrick White

#42. Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.

Chuck Palahniuk

#43. I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

Tom Bissell

#44. There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

#45. I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

Patton Oswalt

#46. My first three books, the collections, were fun to write and a great start but I have matured so much as a writer since then and am extremely proud of the Detective Byone novels- they will be my legacy!

Ricardo M. Fleshman

#47. Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.

Marcus Sakey

#48. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.

Sally Mann

#49. I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.

Khaled Hosseini

#50. I also once heard that if you have enough good ideas for three or four great novels, then what you probably have is actually enough ideas for one good one. That has stayed with me.

Darren White

#51. I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President).

Stephen King

#52. You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

Hilary Mantel

#53. I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.

Mary Balogh

#54. There were three, very large males standing above her, staring. She started from left to right. Big green-eyed male, big green-eyed male and, hey, lookie there, another big green-eyed male. Dear gods. Did I fall so hard that now I am seeing three of them?

Madison Thorne Grey

#55. Three guys and a girl were leaning against a black raised pickup ... I had to do a double take as this group was nothing like I had ever seen before.

Meredith T. Taylor

#56. If my life were like the novels, this would be the dark period in act two after my one true love rejects me, where I reel off to do things I have to apologize for in act three.

Julio Alexi Genao

#57. A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.

Claire Cameron