What Is Plot Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Plot is to literature what individual holes are to miniature golf.

Stanley Elkin

#3. 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

#4. A two-hour movie tends to be a plot-delivery device; you tend to have to introduce all the characters, say what the goal is, and then get there with a setback, but that's not really how life is or what a story necessarily wants to be.

Noah Hawley

#5. All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

Margaret Atwood

#6. Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists only so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody.

John Gardner

#7. The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

Graham Greene

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.,

Elizabeth Bowen

#12. A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot, which is fine with me. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a 'what-if' question ...

Stephen King

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

John Updike

#17. Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.

Elizabeth George

#18. The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.

Niall Williams

#19. At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

Elmore Leonard

#20. When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

Eugene H. Peterson

#21. 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

#22. I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

Meg Rosoff

#23. That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#24. Part of being innovative in government is sometimes not trying to plot out the last chapter of the book, but to be open and see what comes back.

Anthony Foxx

#25. What is the arc of the plot of one's life? I want! I want!

Erica Jong

#26. I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.

Darynda Jones

#27. A baby is a symbol of peace, a plot of dreams, a light of hope, and a bundle of joy.

Debasish Mridha

#28. 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

#29. Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call "pipe" - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.

Michael Schur

#30. There's a story unfolding with a definite beginning and an eventual end, and even though we can't begin to imagine what the whole plot is, and we can hardly even see beyond the present moment, someday we're going to see and understand all of it. For now, we trust. Later, we'll know.

Ann Tatlock

#31. Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg
it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.

Jeanette Winterson

#32. The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.

Franz Grillparzer

#33. Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is ... My process is a bit messier.

Erin Morgenstern

#34. When a number of crimes - for instance, burglaries - can be linked to the same offender, police often plot the locations on a map. The art of finding the location of the criminal's home based on the crime sites is a key objective in what is known as geographical profiling.

Daniel Goldstein

#35. Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what's happening inside this particular person.

Alice McDermott

#36. The most challenging and exciting aspect is the outline and formation of the plot points. This is the stage where the notion of the story begins to take shape, and I can see glimpses of what is to come.

Tony DiTerlizzi

#37. I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.

David Mitchell

#38. The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.

Terry Pratchett

#39. No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

Andrew Sean Greer

#40. Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot ... they don't know what's going to happen to them.

Margaret Atwood

#41. What gives a liturgy its plot? A liturgy is always a sort of drama, that is, an intentional sequence of events, however simple or simply done, that has a plot.

Ellen F. Davis

#42. But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

Jane Campion

#43. To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

John Sayles

#44. There is only one plot - things are not what they seem.

Jim Thompson

#45. The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.

Richard LaGravenese

#46. Now up and atom it's on, I was raised to be strong, and mama told me be a thug since the day I was born. The fame was a plot to try a change me, and what's strange is nobody knew my name.

Tupac Shakur

#47. I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.

Aaron Sorkin

#48. Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about.

Patrick Ness

#49. The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

Sara Sheridan

#50. Good manners, Madam, are had these days not
For your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be's.
The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile
Of serious weeds in a comic lily plot ...

Allen Tate

#51. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

Victor LaValle

#52. All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged
after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.

Mary Ann Shaffer

#53. When we plot the happiness of another, we unconsciously impute to the other person what is in another form the dream in which our own happiness is fulfilled. Thus by not thinking of our own happiness we make it possible for ourselves to become egotistic.

Yukio Mishima

#54. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.

Haruki Murakami

#55. That's what life is, it's the small struggles. You walk down the street for half an hour, you see half an hour of drama. You don't need convoluted plot lines. You don't need long-lost brothers. You don't need it's set on the future; it's set on the moon.

Ricky Gervais

#56. You asked what is the secret of a really good sketch. And it is a sketch is a small play. It's got a beginning, and a middle and an end. It should have a plot; it should have the characters, conflict. It is a little play. And in it, will be funny stuff.

Harvey Korman

#57. I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

Colum McCann

#58. I wonder what it is about a certain novel that ticks the boxes for a reader. I mean, for me, a story can have the most fascinating plot in the world, but if the narrator's voice is dull, then the plot counts for nothing. For me, authorial charm is everything.

Victoria Connelly

#59. There is something universally chilling about a new plot. And I could see how my boy needed time and space for a story to bloom in his mind, because at any age what comes before sight is a conjuring. A trope, which is just a way to believe.

Chang-rae Lee

#60. But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?

Brian Selznick

#61. What I look for in a script is the plot point and whether they're strong, obviously, or not, whether the characters are rich or not, and if I can do justice to the character or not. Some movies you look at and the script is so bad that no one can do anything with the script.

Larenz Tate

#62. Overall, I was generally "delighted" with the book's story -- writing, theme, plot, etc. Seriously, though, I really did revel in it. After all, "what is a book for if not for our enjoyment?

Chris Mentillo

#63. I told her that the plots were all the same, and that the style was pretty terrible. She would answer, 'Well, if it is a good plot, it will stand being read over a good many times, and the style doesn't matter as long as you can understand what the characters are doing.

John Wiley Jr.

#64. It is scary for an actor when you get hired as a lead. No matter what the plot is, it is your job to do something interesting enough to make them want to get inside the lead character's head.

Tom Selleck

#65. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

Linwood Barclay

#66. What a Devil is the Plot good for, but to bring in fine things?

Theresa Villiers

#67. I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

Howard Hawks

#68. I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

Michael Ondaatje

#69. If perchance a friend should betray you; if he forms a subtle plot to get hold of what is yours; if people should try to spread evil reports about you, would you tamely submit to all this without flying into a rage?

Moliere

#70. Some say Twitter is overrated.
Some love it, others hate it.
I guess it depends on what you've got,
If you have guts to write a funny plot!

Ana Claudia Antunes

#71. Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next.

Arnold Bennett

#72. [Plot is] the gradual perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium.

John Barth

#73. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming? ...

Eudora Welty