Top 100 Quotes About Plot
#1. For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#2. The aim is to produce specific results by your actions, so you begin to do things on purpose. If I leave things to chance, I am losing the plot to make success deliberate, meaning I am increasing my chances of failing in any given task.
Archibald Marwizi
#3. It's not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it's all an enemy plot, at least there's someone calling the shots.
James S.A. Corey
#4. As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.
Virginia Woolf
#5. To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!
Ana Claudia Antunes
#6. Nature never deserts the wise and pure; no plot so narrow, be but nature there; no waste so vacant, but may well employ each faculty of sense, and keep the heart awake to love and beauty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#7. Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas.
Harvey Fierstein
#8. The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
Christopher Fowler
#9. Eli's long fingers cupped her face, traced the nape of her neck, kept her still, as if he needed to give her every bit of his attention, as if he could learn her like a language, plot her like a course. Eli kissed Gracie like she was a song and he was determined to hear every note.
Leigh Bardugo
#10. Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.
Caroline Lawrence
#11. My father used to claim that inanimate objects hate us and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.
Michael Marshall Smith
#12. In America, if you are a landowner, you own the minerals vertically underneath your plot. So if there is shale, you get a share.
Jim Ratcliffe
#13. I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.
Suzanne Collins
#14. You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
A.S. Byatt
#16. The Glittering World is a stunning phantasmagoria drawn from the world just beneath the surface, aswarm with great and memorable characters and a plot that twists and turns as it hurtles forward. A grand debut. One taste, and you'll be addicted.
Keith Donohue
#17. The ones [comedies] that I always liked, whether it's Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, or Fast Times of Ridgemont High, they were all about two hours, or a little bit over two hours. With that extra 15 or 20 minutes, you can get to real character and you're not just stuck in plot.
Judd Apatow
#18. The Thickety is a sinister, magical debut with a marvelous and shocking heroine. J.A. White's elegant writing and masterful plot kept me turning pages late into the night.
Lisa McMann
#19. Life has a very simple plot: first you're here and then you're not.
Eric Idle
#20. Most of us live in a fog. It's like life is a movie we arrived to 20 minutes late. You know something important seems to be going on. But we can't figure out the story. We don't know what part we're supposed to play or what the plot is.
John Eldredge
#21. Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.
Nancy Kress
#22. I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.
Alexander McCall Smith
#23. I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.
Carl Barks
#24. But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love
the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.
Joyce Carol Oates
#25. Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Douglas Coupland
#26. In this funny debut, flashy Filipino fashion designer Boy Hernandez sees his American dream become a nightmare when he's ensnared in a terrorist plot and shipped to Guantanamo. Gilvarry nails the couture scene, but Boy's rough journey from Manolo to Gitmo is no joke.
Andrew Abrahams
#27. In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is
Nancy Kress
#28. I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.
Rick Bass
#29. The characters write the plot. Their natures do.
Norman Rush
#30. I tend to favour films that have multiple plot and story lines, multiple characters and ensemble pieces.
Spike Lee
#31. Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
Chinua Achebe
#32. I'm more interested in plot than theme, but I hope my values find their way into my stories: kindness, sympathy, effort, and humor!
Gail Carson Levine
#33. We began to do little things, have little scenes where we just talked about things that had nothing to do with the plot. In fact, in the beginning, they didn't want us to do that. But as time went on, you see that in so many shows. I think we were the first to do that.
Don Knotts
#34. I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.
Julianna Baggott
#35. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
John Hawkes
#36. While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
Marshall McLuhan
#37. I think a lot of drama, nowadays, is character-based and development-based, but 'True Blood' is very plot-oriented.
Deborah Ann Woll
#38. You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.
Lisa Cron
#39. And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out.
Greg Iles
#40. Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me.
Kevin Williamson
#41. It's fair to say I don't know what I'm doing. I like to plot my life and proceed carefully, but life doesn't always follow a plan.
Lisa See
#42. All women know that bridesmaid dresses are a secret plot if the devil.
Helena S. Paige
#43. The plot of the movie seemed stupid to them: Aguirre and everyone were searching for a city that it said right at the beginning did not exist. They didn't understand that that was the whole point. They didn't get that it was awesome because it was so insanely meaningless.
Jesse Andrews
#44. New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.
Patrice Pavis
#45. Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.
Jasper Fforde
#46. If disliking Richard be grounds for accusing a man of conspiracy, I daresay you could implicate half of Christendom in this so-called plot. Richard endears himself easiest to those who've yet to meet him.
Sharon Kay Penman
#48. I started Pilates. I'm the only guy in there. They plot before I get there: 'How can we make John look ridiculous?' Because every exercise involved my legs up, like I'm in the stirrups or something.
John Stamos
#49. The romance is the primary plot in a story that has two plots. The second plot is not a subplot, but one that is interwoven with the romance plot (if that makes sense.) A story needs compelling characters in a compelling plot.
Madeline Hunter
#50. It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.
Leslie Jamison
#51. I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don't believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.
Lisa Unger
#52. I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot, success is my only option, failure's not.
Eminem
#53. The drive ... is to create a one world government ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope ...
Larry McDonald
#54. I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.
Daniel Woodrell
#56. I think that the cultural dominance of narrative forms that seduce you with character and plot perhaps at the expense of ideas, like The Magic Mountain [won't last]. Starvation sharpens the appetite.
David Mitchell
#57. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That's what Congress has come to.
Jim Cooper
#58. The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.
Vanna Bonta
#59. In comics, there are depths that don't reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about 'Watching the Watchmen' - like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air - might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.
Dave Gibbons
#60. The first act is the easiest to plot. The second act is always the hardest to plot. Generally a good, you know, sometimes the third act can be difficult because you can get into a rut in the third act - everybody runs to their Corvette, has a chase, and you catch the bad guy.
Stephen J. Cannell
#61. The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
David Shields
#62. Their next reunion shifted like an oasis on the horizon, and Jude couldn't plot her course. She trudged through her days, haunted by the feeling that real life was happening five thousand kilometers away.
Emma Donoghue
#63. JACK KIRBY is also the central personage of this novel because this is not a good novel. This is a seriously mixed-up book with a central personage who never appears. The plot, like life, resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning.
Jarett Kobek
#64. I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
Matthew Tobin Anderson
#65. The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you're going before you even start. That's a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It's much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more - I want to say 'sophisticated.'
Betty White
#66. If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.
Ann Coulter
#67. I don't know why anyone would be scared of a homeless person. The truly scary people are all the murder mystery writers. They spend all day thinking of the perfect plot on how to kill someone and get away with it.
Shannon L. Alder
#68. I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.
Mark Haddon
#70. The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
Jennifer Egan
#71. Creativity is its own reward. A writer must relish those unfathomable moments when plot-lines and characters fall into place. It's the closest thing to magic we know.
Mark Rubinstein
#73. We go to the mountain for enlightenment, for self-realization, for adventure, for discovery. It's pregnant with meaning. When people see a mountain, they invest it with meaning. Not plot. Not character.
Joe Rohde
#74. I've never sat down and thought about the difference between plot and theme. To me, that's never been important.
Len Wein
#75. There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out.
Brad Meltzer
#76. Details are where a theory can be held together or fall apart. The same is true about a plot.
Sarah Richards
#77. She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.
Lauren Groff
#78. This is what a total breakdown must be, I though. You find yourself standing somewhere you should't be, doing something so out of character that you wonder if you've become someone else entirely. You've lost the plot, taken a wrong turning, jumped into a train whose destination is total lunacy
Gilly Macmillan
#79. I'm going to get even, I swear I will. Mark my words, I'm a pregnant cranky woman with insomnia. I have time to plot my revenge.
Kim Gruenenfelder
#80. Government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.
Lyn Nofziger
#81. I don't want to write about violence, and I don't want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it's cheap.
Alice McDermott
#82. You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
Terry Pratchett
#83. I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.
Joe Abercrombie
#84. Also, as an author, character has always been what I'm most interested in - much more so than plot or setting, although those are good things too.
Lauren Myracle
#85. There you are, Ariadne," said Robin. "The whole plot of your next novel presented to you. All you'll have to do is work in a few false clues, and - of course - do the actual writing.
Agatha Christie
#87. What happens over the next few months is like the plot of a children's movie, the kind where a dog finds its owner in spite of insurmountable odds and prohibitive geography.
Lena Dunham
#88. Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.
Emily Susan Rapp
#89. Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes for the Divine to elaborate.
Rob Brezsny
#90. You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds
Dag Hammarskjold
#91. On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel'. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply.
Edward Gorey
#92. The poem has to bear the weight with image, language ... the screenplay with dialogue, plot ...
Julianna Baggott
#93. Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
#94. This is the problem when you create enemies, Erika. They go off and plot, and often flourish in the shade.
Robert Bryndza
#95. This was how I was going to die - not in battle, not from the plot of some Council member hell-bent on destroying me, but trampled to death by a bunch of pure-bloods. Of all the ways to die.
I was so going to haunt every last one of them.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#96. High heels are a plot against women, they throw our spines out and stop us from standing on the ground.
Jennifer Clement
#97. Words are plastic these days. Small loans made to desperate people at exorbitant interest rates are called payday advances. A cheesy hotel paired with a seedy casino is called a resort. Any assemblage of frenetic images, bad music, and incoherent plot is called a major motion picture.
Dean Koontz
#98. I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting.
Jo Nesbo
#99. The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.
Dara Horn
#100. There are three heavens. The first heaven is the earth and the world of mankind, and the third heaven is where God dwells. However, the second heaven is a place of time and space, where both demons and angels tread, plot, and fight against each other.
Alan Kinross
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