Plot Quotations | Page 3

I plot my ascent daily.

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.

Motivation is the power behind plot.

When 'American Born Chinese' started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn't really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut.

Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gun powder treason should ever be forgot.

We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was, we didn't recruit the right people or technically collect the data, notwithstanding enormous effort to do so,

Wednesday I would have said very, very doubtful, ... Friday, I thought he had a chance, Saturday morning I would have said no. He went out this morning and was excited about the way he felt. We tried to plot out a plan on how to use him, and that's what we did.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.

Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesnt always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.

Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.

The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.

My most enjoyable movie going experiences have always been going to a movie theater, sitting there and the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don't know everything about, and you don't know every plot turn and every character movement that's going to happen.

Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.

Friendship between two women is always a plot against another one.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

Sometimes my plot lines are so convoluted, I get calls from friends at 3 am saying; you SOB, you'll never pull this one off.

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....

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Differentpoints of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.

This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

I studied Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg under Richard Dillard at Hollins, and that year under his tutelage just completely rewired my brain. Both directors combine moral seriousness with great artistry and, certainly in Hitchcock's case, an enormous respect for plot, for its power to enthrall and delight.

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.

He who plots to hurt others often hurts himself.

Sometimes I worry that I've lost the plot My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts I never really dreamed of heaven much Until we put him in the ground. There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free

Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.

No matter how many plots we uncover and disrupt, no matter how many terrorist organizations we degrade or destroy, another individual or group will rise to take their place.

Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

Here's the plot of 'Interstellar.' Refugees - they're known as Democrats - they're looking for a new planet.

You have the capacity to change the plot line of your life, even if you've been acting from the same script since before you can remember. No matter what has happened up to this point, you have the right and the capacity to be happy. You are an innately creative being, capable of writing a love story worth living.

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.

"Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot."

[In plotting earthquake measurements] the range between the largest and smallest magnitudes seemed unmanageably large. Dr. Beno Gutenberg then made the natural suggestion to plot the amplitudes logarithmically.

The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

Good characters the reader cares about combined with an intriguing plot. Do those two and you've got it made.

Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.

I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

When we were preparing the president's speech we had originally picked a different plot to try and declassify to talk about.

The plot behind this terror attack is obvious - to agitate the situation in a country that holds a leading position in the Arab world and to undermine the situation in the Middle East as a whole.

The plot . . . involved discussion of the ownership of one of the major Ukrainian TV channels and in order to bring about this, the prime minister acted in such a manner,

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.

With the plot effectively beaten back, we can now get back on track.

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Bleak House is a great baggy thing, the plot doesn't work in all sorts of parts, so you've got to tinker with it. Usually I tell myself, find the spine of the story and stick to that and chuck out anything not related to the spine of the story, but that doesn't work with Dickens. You lose the flavor of him if you don't include all those other extra comic characters that he couldn't stop himself from creating. The plot bulges out. It's like horrible boils or something, but in a nice way.

When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

I started to plot out different scenarios. I was thinking about investors, friends, banks, but nothing seemed to really work out the way I needed it to. Then I just happened to hear about this other shop owner, who I sort of knew, who was moving out of his building.

Think about where you want to be in a year or two, then plot out the steps you need to take to get there.

Beating up on public schools is not just our nation's favorite blood sport, but also a favorite conversational entertainment of the well-off - like debating the most recent toothsome plot twists of 'Big Love' - who, of course, have no dog in the fight.

The three people that can remember.. I had them plot on the map where they thought it was.

The size of the property and the magnitude of what we're dealing with is amazing. But we're planning a community, not dealing with a plot of land.

With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel.

I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable.

The woeful tales of 'Super Mario Bros.' and 'Street Fighter' have taught studios that merely slapping a name to a movie is not enough to bring in the fans of the franchise. Also, the way games now unfold their stories more parallels that of a movie, with characters and plot points actually meaning as much as a high score.

The organization's core elements still plot and make preparations for terrorist strikes against the homeland and other targets from bases in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.

Punters are piling in on Dr Who but we have not taken a penny for last year's winner - Coronation Street. They must think that the Corrie plot line is a real turkey!

Fanboys are a creator's blessing and curse. If a fanboy likes you, they love you. Obsessively. If you cross them with some plot point or story direction they reject, expect to be wholly and continually eviscerated across the Internet.

Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.

They sometimes give the impression, have done for years, that there's an Anglo-Saxon world out there waiting to do them down. Just as much as our anti-Europeans think there's a Franco-German plot to do down the Brits in Europe

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

Estimates are that in 2012, more than 32 million books were available - the explosion, thanks to the ease of self-publishing; 2013 could see even more titles grace our virtual bookstores! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters.

The play is about taking those pieces and putting them back together, ... The actors don't have much opportunity to convey that to the audience. I'm trying to get the secondary plot in line with the events that Macbeth instigates.

The play is pretty straightforward and the plot is pretty easy to follow. Someone doesn't have to be well-versed. This is the easiest Shakespeare we're doing this season.

This will help us plot the plan for the future of our generating facility. It is a critical need for our area.

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.

This film is about the fact that it's important for people, particularly families, to communicate with each other. But we're playing people who find it hard to communicate. You can't wrap the plot up into a tiny little sentence. So it was clear to me it was going to take some time to get the film made.

They were intercepted before the plot could reach fruition.

A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there?

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

I've found Jin to be the exception to the rule. His story is integral to the plot of 'Lost,' and is the most fleshed out character I've ever played on TV. The thing I like most is that he's the opposite of what he seemed when the show first started. At first, he seemed to be a one dimensional, conservative, unfeeling Asian, but now you see that he's much more.

I know there's not usually second acts in American life, so it's nice to have a second plot. The first plot was alright, but this current plot, the kind of slow climb, is what we always wanted to do. We just kind of got swept up in another thing for a couple years.

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.

I need it all: in-depth characterization, fantastic/warped world building, a plot that could out-race Secretariat, and a 'voice.' I need to hear a uniqueness in the author's voice.

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.

I outline in some detail, but even after the outline is done I often get a new idea that is an improvement, so the outline is a living, breathing thing as well. I also re-outline when I'm two-thirds done, to be sure that there is an emotional payoff from all the plot lines and to be sure the story is as tight as it can be.

If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.

If life is just a stage, then we are all running around ad-libbing, with absolutely no clue what the plot is. Maybe that's why we don't know whether it's a comedy or tragedy.

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

I love good stories; you have to have a good plot - characters which intertwine with a good plot.

In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was.

In the creative industries, there are few things more exciting than a zinger - a thought, idea, line, plot device - anything really, that just totally works in a fundamentally new and fresh way. It's like a uniquely lovely melody or a new taste idea in cooking. Something special, something new, something wonderful. They're also very rare.

In some cases, the ideal thing with organic gardening is to have more than one garden - one plot where you're adding compost and letting it rot and another where you're actually planting something. When you add too much compost into the garden and plant the same year, it might be difficult for the plants to grow the first year, as the compost decomposes.

If you need to take a step back from day-to-day operations and plot out the long-term direction of your user experience strategy, consultants can give you a perspective you can't get on your own.