Plot Quotations | Page 5

Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?

Stand-up is just me trying to be as funny as possible in the most concentrated hour with me standing on stage with no storyline, no plot line, and no character development.

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.

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.

My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story. I saw the core part of the plot. But if I ever take another look at it then I can see that there was some more stuff going on in there that I didn't realize.

Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film.

Every search has its own momentum. It is why a search makes such an excellent plot for a film or story.

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

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

In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.

Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.

Plots are for dead people.

A lot of cop shows, because they have the restraints of having a new case every episode, the victims often become these kind of nameless, faceless plot points, and as an audience we don't feel anything for those people.

But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.

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.

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.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.

Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.

Once somebody's aware of a plot, it's like a bone sticking out. If it breaks through the skin, it's very ugly.

I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique -- 'What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?'

The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

I don't usually read my reviews. I've noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don't seem to be bothered by the complications at all.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

Welcome to the real world, she said to me. Condescendingly. Take a seat. Take your life. Plot it out in black and white.

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

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.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

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

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

Carney is like a graveyard where everyone already owns their plots and has built houses on top of them.

One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.

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.

I try not to be too plot-heavy and to balance the dramatic with the comedic.

The Monkees was a straight sitcom, we used the same plots that were on the other situation comedies at the time. So the music wasn't threatening, we weren't threatening.

I like fast plots with things that explode.

I would love to travel to the future to plot out some things so there's no more guess work.

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.

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language... the screenplay with dialogue, plot...

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

He obtained from Congress the right to borrow from the people by selling to it the 'bonds' of States ... and the Government and the nation escaped the plots of the foreign financiers. They understood at once, that the United States would escape their grip. The death of Lincoln was resolved upon.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

To save my son, I would plot with the devil himself.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

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.

Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don't.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

Through all the drama - whether damned or not -Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot.

There are only so many plots in the world. It's how they unfold that makes them interesting.

In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.

Shakespeare, who never could think up a plot by himself, found this one [Macbeth] in Holinshed's Chronicles, changing it just enough so that no one would recognize the source. He didn't count on the resourcefulness of modern scholars, who have to discover things like this to become associate professors.

In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control.

My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

I really felt sometimes like I was physically pulling the plot, and it was heavy. I'm sure it didn't look great that I was going into my dressing room at lunch.

The fantastic thing about the theatre is that it can make something be seen that's invisible, and that's where my interest in theatre is- that you can be watching this thing happening with actors and costumes and light and set and language, and even plot, and something emerges from beyond that, and that's the image part that I'm looking for, that sort of added dimension.

Spy plots are hard, really hard.

Terrorist bombers on the left, fascist plots on the right.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

My muse is an ungrateful harlot who’s abandoned me to actually come up with my own plots.

The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don't remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.

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.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.

Satan cannot deny but that great wonders have been wrought by prayer. As the spirit of prayer goes up, so his kingdom goes down. Satan's strategems against prayer are three. First, if he can, he will keep thee from prayer. If that be not feasible, secondly, he will strive to interrupt thee in prayer. And, thirdly, if that plot takes not, he will labour to hinder the success of thy prayer.

Everyone must hoe his plot daily...

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.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.

You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That's our role.

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

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

And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot.

PLOT is CHARACTER revealed by ACTION.

I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot

To honor life, we must be willing to grow through what we don't know yet, and outgrow what we know no longer fits us. We must be willing to give in to the process, moment by moment, realizing a new plot may be unfolding.

When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.

Europe is being absolutely swamped and destroyed with the crime and the problems, and it could be some sinister plot.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

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.

Rashly, And praised be rashness for it--let us know, Our indiscretion sometime serves us well When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will

Do not carry a spirit of contradiction, for it is to be freighted with stupidity and with peevishness, and your intelligence should plot against it; though it may well be the mark of mental genius to see objection, a wrangler about everything cannot

Character is plot, plot is character.

I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot, success is my only option, failure's not.

The best laid plot can injure its maker, and often a man's perfidy will rebound on himself.