Top 100 The Plot Quotes
#1. The plot details of B movies are irrational: accept that people do things that are contradictory, against their own best interests, have short term aims & limited attention span, and do incredibly stupid things while things blow up. Apart from things blowing up, this is just like the music industry.
Robert Fripp
#2. Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
#3. The Carrie in the plot was too much like the Carrie in the book. She smoked, she swore a lot, she was very hard, very cynical. I could never have pulled it off.
Kristin Davis
#4. Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
Robert E. Howard
#5. Think of it as the Doorway of No Return. The feeling must be that your lead character, once she passes through, cannot go home again until the major problem of the plot is solved.
James Scott Bell
#6. I think invariably when you are dealing with relationships, the films really center on that, and the plot is really born out of that. That's the most core part of a relationship: intimacy, I think, whether it's expressed or not.
Lisa Cholodenko
#7. Baseball is part of America's plot, part of America's mysterious, underlying design-the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life.
Albert Allen Bartlett
#8. Rocking on a lazy billow
With roaming eyes,
Cushioned on a dreamy pillow,
Thou art now wise.
Wake the power within thee slumbering,
Trim the plot that's in thy keeping,
Thou wilt bless the task when reaping
Sweet labour's prize.
John Stuart Blackie
#9. I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.
Brian Helgeland
#10. Your life is not so complicated. God has already written the script, casted the key players. It is when we try to re-write the plot that we encounter unnecessary drama. Accept the role God has chosen you to play. Faith in his direction will assure an Oscar worthy performance!
Carlos Wallace
#11. The writer and the dreamer have so much in common: They can't control the plot, they are always part of the story or the dream.
Isabel Allende
#12. At that point only two things were clear to me: first, that the plot had to move readers as much as it moved me;
Antonio Garrido
#14. One day I'm just going to say, "Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke. Screw the plot! Watch the program.
Rebecca Eaton
#16. Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
Margaret Atwood
#17. What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?
George Villiers
#18. I'm very close to my family. Not like these big stars - not mentioning any names - who lose the plot and don't know who they are.
Jennifer Ellison
#19. You need a revolution in your life so as to know the plot of the devil and discover the thoughts of the Lord toward you
Sunday Adelaja
#20. Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
Aimee Carter
#21. There's not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.
P. J. O'Rourke
#22. So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.
Jeffery Deaver
#23. You can't have a movie with a group of people that are significant players in the story, that push forward the plot, without introducing at least one or two of them.
Evangeline Lilly
#24. The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.
The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.
Adrienne Rich
#25. An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.
Shane Black
#26. An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.
Chuck Jones
#27. I wonder if Stephen King ever uses dreams in his writing. You know, as yeast to make the plot rise.
Stephen King
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
Christopher Fowler
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is
Nancy Kress
#35. The characters write the plot. Their natures do.
Norman Rush
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.
Vanna Bonta
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Usually when I put my focus on the pacing, the plot, the specific characterizations, - it's ironic - but then I actually increase my chances of writing something that moves people because I haven't become too self-conscious of the goal.
Christopher Rice
#45. From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.
W. H. Auden
#46. There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need [ ... ] to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions. - Agent Branch (58)
Don DeLillo
#47. The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.
Dara Horn
#48. If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.
Mark Billingham
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. 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
#57. Character is half the reason we read. We're excited because of the plot, but we care because of the characters.
Patrick Rothfuss
#58. In 'Law & Order,' your main job is to stay out of the way of the plot. On another show you'd receive your script and see stuff that seems challenging and feel excited that the writers thought highly enough of you to write it for you.
Jeremy Sisto
#59. I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart.
Ben Affleck
#60. The plot thickens," he said, and wished he hadn't said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. "I think we have a suspect." That didn't sound much better. "My house has just exploded, by the way." At least that was novel.
Kate Atkinson
#61. The most important thing in the job is to make movies about women where they are characters that have consequences in the story. They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don't care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter.
Amy Pascal
#62. The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
Graham Greene
#63. Readers often tell me after they've read the books, they find it difficult to sum up the plot in a simple way. My response is, "It's a story about the love a father shares for his daughter. All the rest is just filler."
- MJ Mancini, on his best-selling trilogy, "Revelation".
M.J. Mancini
#64. I am greedy for both Hollywood and Bollywood. For me, Bollywood is not new, as it is something that I grow up on ... I know the plot ... stories and characters that are written and made. I haven't got the right opportunity to show my work in Bollywood.
Tena Desae
#65. Character is the plot in many ways
Junot Diaz
#66. When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
Tea Obreht
#67. The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.
Michael Connelly
#68. I'm frustrated when I see movies in which I feel like the plot is being told to me instead of shown to me.
Channing Tatum
#69. It is possible to combine a story line and plot line in the same work. Usually the storylines comes first, serving as a background to the plot line, but not always.
James N. Frey
#70. The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickenswith the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.
Woodrow Wilson
#71. In the story of life, the prologue and epilogue are written by God. Yet the plot has been given to us; therefore we should write the best prose we can.
James D. Maxon
#72. What is the arc of the plot of one's life? I want! I want!
Erica Jong
#73. Here's the plot of 'Interstellar.' Refugees - they're known as Democrats - they're looking for a new planet.
David Letterman
#74. The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot.
James N. Frey
#76. Part of the reason why so many actors lose the plot when they go over to America is that they become part of an industry, so that's why they don't want to play weak, bad or vulnerable guys - because that's not sellable; that diminishes their profit margin.
Peter Mullan
#77. I have a book coming out in September, for example, where the plot concerns counterfeiting, and I had to do a lot of research on that. Or on any legal matters, for example, I have to do a lot of research online.
Evan Hunter
#78. Sometimes you can have a great scene but if just doesn't need to be in the movie. If it's not progressing the plot, not progressing the story, not adding to the momentum, or if it's not purposefully serving a breath - it has got to go.
Kevin Feige
#79. The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet' but none is planned.
Graham Nelson
#80. I don't like to go to the movies to see violence or some kind of spy thing with all kinds of information you have to assimilate to understand the plot.
Pia Zadora
#81. You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it.
Margaret Atwood
#82. People see their own lives as stories; a lifelong story with a single hero or heroine ... much contemporary unhappiness is due to the fact that people in high tech societies receive neither strong myths and stories from their culture nor the ability to construct their own ... they lose the plot.
Guy Claxton
#83. Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Plot, Behaving in Much the Manner Of a Soup to which Corn Starch Has been Added, Begins, at Last, to Thicken.
Steven Brust
#84. I want my stories to be understood and enjoyed by anyone, so I need 'beta-readers' who will tell me when the plot is working or not working, and when my writing is concise or vague.
Tony DiTerlizzi
#85. While I've written in the POV (point of view) of adolescent characters before ... I never have had to create novels in which those characters not only drive the plot, but also are instrumental in resolving whatever issue the plot deals with.
Elizabeth George
#86. I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.
Ruth Rendell
#87. 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
#88. Keith Richards outlived Jim Fixx, the runner and health nut. The plot thickens.
Bill Hicks
#89. For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.
John Updike
#90. When we mean to build, We first survey the plot, then draw the model; And when we see the figure of the house, Then must we rate the cost of the erection.
William Shakespeare
#91. I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.
Dara Horn
#92. Idiot."
"That fact is well established and adds nothing to the plot.
Leigh Bardugo
#93. If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.
Tom Stoppard
#94. After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.
Ashwin Sanghi
#95. But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
C.S. Lewis
#96. When I wrote Rick, I had the idea that I would take the plot of nearly every opera and turn it into a dark film, which is something I still may do.
Daniel Handler
#97. I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.
Marie Brennan
#98. I tell stories through dance, and I think that's why I'm so attracted to the theatre because even the choreography in theatre moves the plot forward at all times.
Susan Stroman
#99. I elect to stay on the soil of which I was born and on the plot of ground which I have fairly bought and honestly paid for. Don't advise me to leave, and don't add insult to injury by telling me it's for my own good; of that I am to be the judge.
Robert Purvis
#100. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.
George R R Martin
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