Quotes About Plots

#1. People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.

Kevin Spacey

#2. My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

Anthony Horowitz

#3. I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

Maira Kalman

#4. She was the sort of person from whom one would expect to receive warm cookies, not plots.

Anne Elisabeth Stengl

#5. Maybe more of us should have plots. Let's take them out of books and put them back in life where they belong.

Jennifer Ball

#6. I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

Alan Furst

#7. I look for material that both interest me and challenges me. If I am drawn to the material and I have to work hard at it, the characters and the plots reflect the hours and hours of research.

David Baldacci

#8. Plots, true or false, are necessary things, To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.

John Dryden

#9. I'm not like Jonathan Hickman, who's able to sort of plot out three years of a book ahead of time. I'm much more of a guy who plots out an arc or two at a time.

Marc Guggenheim

#10. There are no new plots, but there are plenty of fresh new characters with whom you can grab the reader. Characterization is the key to successful commercial fiction. Characterization starts with goal, motivation, and conflict. Character

Debra Dixon

#11. I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots ... so I have to do something else.

Karin Fossum

#12. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#13. 40 Words for Sorrow is brilliant-one of the finest crime novels I've ever read. Giles Blunt writes with uncommon grace, style and compassion and he plots like a demon. This book has it all-unforgettable characters, beautiful language, throat-constricting suspense.

Jonathan Kellerman

#14. Mobile phones would have wrecked the plots of most of Shakespeare's plays.

Jackie French

#15. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.

Anais Nin

#16. That's the trouble with you readers. You know all the plots.

Billy Wilder

#17. I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulating our minds. This is one reason IQs have been going up.

Alex Tabarrok

#18. In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally.

Katharine Whitehorn

#19. Power needs plots because plots are secret until they unfold and the most gratifying kind of power is holding onto an explosive secret.

Glenn Haybittle

#20. The intelligence investigation under the leadership of Senator Church, which I know has helped cause this investigation by you, points out that the agencies did not disclose certain facts to us and that certain plots were going on.

John Sherman Cooper

#21. Little plots and stories, acted out and screened, can't possibly be called cinema. They have nothing whatever to do with cinema. A cinematographic work is above all a work which would not be possible in any other art form. In other words. it can be created by means of cinema, and cinema alone

Andrei Tarkovsky

#22. There are those who maintain that in this world women have no right to interfere in the affairs of state, in politics, in plots and counter-plots. Others that are who, more chivalrous, are willing to admit that women have as much right to act, think, and speak as men.

Belle Boyd

#23. He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.

Hanya Yanagihara

#24. How can such episodes of such savage cruelty happen? The heart of man is an abyss out of which sometimes emerge plots of unspeakable ferocity capable of overturning in an instant the tranquil and productive life of a people.

Pope John Paul II

#25. I get fed up with plots that are driven by someone constantly getting information on a computer.

Liam Neeson

#26. We are now at a point where because we in fact have been successful at stopping a number of plots, a threat has evolved. We do see these lone-wolf actors. We do see these encouragements for troubled individuals to pick up a gun and act out of this ideology.

Barack Obama

#27. It is only the failure of my plots I fear.

Shulamith Firestone

#28. Shortly after we were in bed I began my story, but made it so absurd, so long, and so tiresome, that, as my intention was, I sent her to sleep, and should have gone to sleep myself - but dark plots are ever wakeful. ("The Story of Prince Barkiarokh")

William Beckford

#29. Satan didn't lose any of his beguiling ways when he became the fallen prince. He took his charm, his subtleties, and his clever plots to use on us.

Billy Graham

#30. All the characters and plots were predetermined. Games make bad plots.

Margaret Weis

#31. All the plots of hell and commotions on earth have not so much as shaken God's hand to spoil one letter or line he has been drawing.

William Gurnall

#32. The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.

P. J. O'Rourke

#33. All good plots come from well-orchestrated characters pitted against one another in a conflict of wills.

James N. Frey

#34. Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.

Grant Morrison

#35. As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

#36. He had no big plan for this. He had not prepared for the day when he would be fighting his own work. He had not plotted against his own plots.

Dean F. Wilson

#37. From plots and treasons Heaven preserve my years, But save me most from my petitioners. Unsatiate as the barren womb or grave; God cannot grant so much as they can crave.

John Dryden

#38. Folly plots a fool's death from the moment they become friends. Wisdom bestows blessings upon a wise man from the moment they wed.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#39. He that seeketh to be eminent amongst able men hath a great task; but that is ever good for the public. But he that plots to be the only figure amongst ciphers is the decay of a whole age.

Francis Bacon

#40. 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

#41. It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots.

Michael O'Brien

#42. Cartoons for girls don't have to be a puddle of smooshy, cutesy-wootsy, goody-two-shoeness. Girls like stories with real conflict; girls are smart enough to understand complex plots; girls aren't as easily frightened as everyone seems to think.

Lauren Faust

#43. Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!

Sadegh Hedayat

#44. Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.

Michael Connelly

#45. This is all thousands of years old. It's the same the world over. Anyone who has ever walked upright has loved beer, celebrated over it, told talks over it, hatched plots over it, courted over it. It's what we do as a species. It's what makes us human. We brew.

Alan D. Eames

#46. Real life seems to have no plots.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

#47. He who plots to hurt others often hurts himself.

Aesop

#48. Plots within plots, but all roads lead down the dragon's gullet.

George R R Martin

#49. Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.

Etgar Keret

#50. I don't think I could, with a straight face, describe myself as a completely positive person, but I'm not overly negative, either. On the whole, most writers think plots through to their consequences, and it's not always a sunny place. I have an occupational temperament for anxiety.

James Lasdun

#51. American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

Siri Hustvedt

#52. The devil hath his gunpowder plots, and mines, which may blow you up before you are aware. Not

Richard Baxter

#53. What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the 'who' will always matter more than the 'what.' It's fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it's happening to.

Lisa Gardner

#54. The insecure people enjoy bad mouthing the others. They indulge in the continuous havoc and they tangle themselves in this spider web of plots and conflicts. I really wonder what it is about their inner life that make them so insecure. #Justmyobservation.

Euginia Herlihy

#55. Plots behind plots, plans behind plans. There was always another secret.

Brandon Sanderson

#56. That's the problem with fiction - or the charm, if you want. Even mediocre plots have a way of sinking their hooks into you, until you find yourself concerned for the fates of characters who aren't even fully convincing.

Charles McGrath

#57. At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.

Malcolm Gladwell

#58. I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.

Molly Antopol

#59. My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.

Juliet Marillier

#60. Each day I'd wake up to a stream of strangers' most important life questions and concerns. It was like knowing the plots to countless movies but never being able to see the ending.

Greg Dybec

#61. The world could be as small as it was cruel. She wondered at God sometimes, his schemes, his plans, his plots, his sense of order. Maybe he was just like the Bible - beautiful and overwritten and redundant and badly in need of editing.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#62. I have been a stranger in a strange land, Halleck quoted. Paul stared at him, recognizing the quotation from the O.C. Bible, wondering: Does Gurney, too, wish an end to devious plots?

Frank Herbert

#63. Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.

Marcel Marceau

#64. I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

Peter Greenaway

#65. CBS announced they're canceling As The World Turns. Don't worry though, if you're addicted to the twisted plots, the intrigue, the illicit sex, you can still watch golf.

Craig Ferguson

#66. The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.

Jill Lepore

#67. I would actually write books totally full of nothing BUT kissing scenes, but apparently people like books to have, like, "plots" or whatever.

Rachel Hawkins

#68. Life plots elegantly.

Alice Randall

#69. We need to teach our nation to detest any form of plots, insinuations, evil intrigues and violence.

Sunday Adelaja

#70. Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

Sophie Hannah

#71. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.

Caroline B. Cooney

#72. All holy books are, above all, great stories whose plots deal with the basic aspects of human nature, setting them within a particular moral context and a particular framework of supernatural dogma.
-Andreas Corelli

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#73. As one of my creative writing professors once said, there are only seven plots. What makes those plots different is how you handle them, your voice, your style, and your way of thinking. That's all. People can mimic your style, but they can never achieve your unique point of view.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

#74. If you stop one terror attack in the U.S., it may be connected to multiple other plots out there that are connected. If you reveal that you stopped one plot, it may tip our hand.

Patrick McHenry

#75. I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

Michael Connelly

#76. All plots are cliche.

Jincy Willett

#77. Spy plots are hard, really hard.

Rashida Jones

#78. I'm told my SF is of the hard variety and my Fantasy is romantic but hopefully all the characters are strong and the plots are lively.

Sarah Zettel

#79. A president of the United States, again, has to bring people together, have a position. We need to be able to penetrate these people when they are involved in these plots and these plans. And we have to give the local authorities the ability to penetrate to disrupt. That's what we need to do.

John Kasich

#80. Anyway, you don't know what's going to happen. I'm only just thickening the plot.
I'd say it was pretty thick already.
Thick plots are my specialty. If you want a thinner kind, look elsewhere.

Margaret Atwood

#81. Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

Claire Tomalin

#82. I'm real bent on dialogue. I'm just a little bit crazy and when you put that along with 20 years as a criminal lawyer, it's pretty easy to come up with some interesting plots.

Christopher Darden

#83. We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

Janette Turner Hospital

#84. I think sometimes she lies in bed at night and plots ways to make my life suck.
There can be no other explanation.

Sarra Manning

#85. What terrifies me? When I read about plots of evil taking over the world and obliterating women's hard-won rights.

Julie Carmen

#86. Perhaps summer's ephemeral nature is what inspires us to embrace the beach read. We tell ourselves that these twisted plots and wild characters are literary ice cream sundaes - extravagant treats that aren't as calorie-laden when we're wearing flip flops.

Sarah MacLean

#87. He was still there when, having seen history now as a place rich in whims and incomprehensible plots for Reasons of State, he learned from Saint-Savin how treacherous was the great machine of the world, plagued by the iniquities of Chance.

Umberto Eco

#88. Growing up, for years and years I had no idea what the plots of operas were, and that's part of what fascinated me - I could make them up and learn bits and pieces of what was going on over time. There's something about it being always a step away that makes it more fun to chase.

Rufus Wainwright

#89. Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.

Bayard Rustin

#90. Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

Emma Donoghue

#91. Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present.

Lionel Shriver

#92. The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

A.A. Milne

#93. I get a lot of inspiration from Japanese manga, especially shoujo which tends to have elaborate and fantastical adventure plots.

Cassandra Clare

#94. I'm not interested in plots. I'm interested only in the characterization of people and what they do.

Erskine Caldwell

#95. Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

Henry Miller

#96. That's what life holds for you. You make plans, carefully plots whole road-map; but you never know when a vehicle comes at you full throttle from the next bend and knocks you down.

Aman Jassal

#97. I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction, and I really liked doing those, and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me.

Paula Hawkins

#98. The funny thing is, though I write mysteries, it is the one genre in adult fiction I never read. I read Nancy Drew, of course, when I was a kid, but I think the real appeal is as a writer because I'm drawn to puzzly, complicated plots.

Elise Broach

#99. The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

Gilbert Murray

#100. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.

Edgar Allan Poe