Plot Quotations

Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what's going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character's choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.

I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.

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.

The winner must promote social jusitce, remove corruption and discrmination, and stand against political, cultural and economic plots.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

I get fed up with plots that are driven by someone constantly getting information on a computer.

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.

Mr. Chairman, on September 11, we were attacked by terrorists who took advantage of weaknesses in our border security. After infiltrating our country, the terrorists were able to conceal their real identities, and thereby plot their attacks without fear of being apprehended.

The rules I go by are: Always keep your villains bad, and keep the plot grounded and real. If you keep those stakes, the comedy will bounce off that and work.

The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.

Part of the plot was a knock that V wanted to bring down the government and bring chaos. I don't know why I thought of Guy Fawkes, because it was during the summer. I thought that would be great if he looked like Guy Fawkes, kind of theatrical.

My temper manifests itself when I can't find something. I could swear that there is a plot against me to put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers.

In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

A lot of times with novels, you can get a really deep, engaging story, but there's not a lot happening, frankly. Those books tend to be super-literary and dense, and they require a lot of commitment, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want fast-moving action and gore and plot and excitement, you can get shorted on that.

I actually hope people don't react to 'Impossible' in a way where they think it's terribly retro. The plot needed to do what it needed to do. But I'm a little surprised to find myself looking a little bit like an advocate of teen marriage. It takes some exceptional circumstances for that to be a reasonable idea.

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

I've started movies without screenplays both on 'Clash' and on 'Hulk,' and that is tremendously stressful because you have a tendency to overcompensate with effects. You haven't tested it in your head. You didn't run it over and over again and covered all of the plot holes and figure it out. It's a marathon that you sprint.

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.

Writing a log line helps you define - for yourself - the essential elements of the plot. It will also let you know immediately if major components of the plot are missing.

What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?

A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.

Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot.

Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.

I lose tons of stuff on the cutting room floor. For Scary Movie 3, for example, we had a lot of Matrix spoofs, a Hulk scene, and some of that stuff just doesn't hold up - it's too much plot, audiences just didn't want to hear about it.

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

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.

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' is an epistolary novel - one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

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.

God, I'd love to do a big commercial movie that made a lot of money and whose plot was interesting too.

As long as the plots keep arriving from outer space, I'll go on with my virgins.

Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt.

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.

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.

In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material.

I like having a plot, I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.

I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

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.

There was a time when my parents had to sell off a plot of land so that I can buy a rifle for competitive tournaments. After that we stayed in a rented house for the next 15 years.

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called 'Les Mains d'Orlac.' Call it a bastard offspring of 'Frankenstein;' its plot revolved around the old theme of Science Giving Us Stuff We Shouldn't Have - in this particular case, restoring severed body parts.

I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.

In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.

Grief doesn't have a plot. It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.

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

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.

A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

I was lucky because logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

Government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.

I'm not willing to risk more terrorist plots succeeding and more paedophiles going free.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out.

I saw the Kino print of 'The Man From Beyond,' but apparently a superior new print has been produced by Restored Serials. Maybe a few snippets of missing footage will close up some of the plot holes, but I have my doubts.

There's a stigma that guys hate romance and hate love, but that's not true. Look at 'Iron Man.' There's a whole through-line plot about his relationship with Pepper, and everybody loves it.

I remember the guest stars who came, they were always trying to find a new plot for their characters because they wanted to stay. It was really a great working environment.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

The cliches are that it's the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.

I don't care how good a song is. If it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.

Not counting 'Small Steps,' I think 'Holes' is my best book, in terms of plot, and setting, and the way the story revealed itself. It hasn't changed my life, other than that I have more money than I did before I wrote it. I'm still too close to 'Small Steps' to compare it to 'Holes.'

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

Finding the discipline, the motivation, the focus, the passion to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen every day and then to make it come alive with characters and with plot is incredibly exciting and at the same time terrifying and frustrating, and sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it comes really hard.

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!

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.

There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.

The sentence imposed on Abdul Kadir sends a powerful and clear message. We will bring to justice those who plot to attack the United States of America.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

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.

The so-called commercialism includes elements like story, plots, rhythms and large big scenes.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.

We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.

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.

Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

There are few films where you have women really driving the plot.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

I wrote a book called 'Doll Bones', which was another middle-grade book, and when I was writing it, I needed a place in the U.S. that made bone china. And there are only two places in the U.S. that make bone china. They made it by grinding down actual cow bones. It was a plot point. It was a creepy doll book.

I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.

I think, when I was younger, I believed in - and yearned for - conventional beauty. I thought there was a spectrum from ugly to beautiful, and that you could objectively plot everyone you saw along it.

In comics, there are depths that don't reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about 'Watching the Watchmen' - like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air - might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.

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.

I've paid the price; I definitely have a reputation that precedes me, and there is a camp that plots my demise. But then again... it's funner that way.

All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself