Plot Quotes - Page 9

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

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.

The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let's not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I'd seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer's pre-ejaculatory tendency: "The End!"

The CIA has a plot...they've used before to get rid of world leaders. Only problem...is convincing Hussein...to fly to Dallas.

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.

I've always loved movies dealing with the terror of a woman who doesn't really know her husband and finds out that he's a monster. It's one of my favorite plots.

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

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.

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.

I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

Discovered W. Somerset Maugham in about 5th grade. Didn't understand the plots, but loved the descriptions.

I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.

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.

Spy plots are hard, really hard.

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.

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

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

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

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

I need time to develop the idea into a plot before I talk about it.

The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot.

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

No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between a man and a plot of land.

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

Every so often you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can’t let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer’s room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.