Plot Quotes - Page 10

• There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Two

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• I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).

  Charles Stross

  Character, Track, Progress

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• 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.

  Charles Stross

  Mean, Use, Way

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• When I think about directing a film, the thing that stops me short is wondering if I'm a natural at it the way I think you, and PTA, and Fincher are born directors. Maybe some people's talent is in understanding the ways that film communicates, without dialogue, without plot.

  Edward Norton

  Thinking, People, Understanding

  Interview with Bennett Miller, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 3, 2014.

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• 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.

  Marjane Satrapi

  Ideas, Design, Add

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• I had to learn the image is not the word, which is a jolt for a literary soul. But it has served me well in terms of understanding plot, in terms of watching actors develop characters.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Character, Understanding, Soul

  Interview with Janet Justs, ejournals.lib.vt.edu. November 6, 2003.

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• I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

  Rebecca Miller

  Ocean, Writing, Ignorance

  "Author Rebecca Miller Talks Male Perspective, Piecing Together a Novel, and Fly Sex in Jacob's Folly". Interview with Kayla Tanenbaum, www.glamour.com. March 11, 2013.

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• 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.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Doe, Attention, Done

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• If our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Enemy, Violence, Method

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• The drive . . . is to create a one world government ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope . . . .

  Larry McDonald

  Mean, World Government, Order

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• The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.

  Zadie Smith

  Cynical, Marketing, Quirky

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• 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.

  Alice Sebold

  Writing, Voice, Different

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• When I was a film critic, the reason I kind of found it disenchanting was because the things that I wanted to talk about were the ideas in the movie, the theme of it, and contextual elements that weren't necessarily central to the story. But the only thing people really wanted was a plot description and how many stars I'd give it. It didn't matter how much effort you put into writing a piece, they looked at it solely as a consumer's guide toward going or not going to films.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Stars, Writing, Ideas

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. November 15, 2006.

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• While I am usually in despair when a movie abandons its plot for a third act given over entirely to action, I have no problem with the way Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ends, because it has been pointing toward this ending, hinting about it, preparing us for it, all the way through. What a glorious movie.

  Roger Ebert

  Secret, Despair, Potters

  Roger Ebert (2004). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005”, p.274, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• If I had to catalog all the moronic plot turns in The Day After Tomorrow, we'd be here until the next ice age. It's just so very bad. You can have a pretty good time snickering at it-unless, like me, you think there's something to this global warming thing, and you shudder at the irony of a movie meant to warn people about a dangerous environmental trend that completely discredits it. Is it possible that the film is a plot to make environmental activists look as wacko as anti-environmentalists always claim they are?

  David Edelstein

  Thinking, Ice, People

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• Critics are giving marks for originality, acting, photography and scripting, while mass audiences are more drawn to familiarity of genre, stars they would like to have sex with or plots that are more likely to make their dates have sex with them. Reviewers are doing their day's work, cinema-goers are escaping from theirs: this leads to an inevitable difference of response. It is, though, wrong to conclude that reviewers are completely useless. Books, movies and shows may be critic-proof, but the egos and psyches of the people who make them very rarely are.

  Mark Lawson

  Photography, Sex, Stars

  "Who cares what the reviews say?" by Mark Lawson, www.theguardian.com. May 24, 2006.

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

  Bob Mayer

  Character, Two, Care

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• Personally, my taste is towards development of a character, as well as the resolution of a story plot. I like to find both, if I can.

  Alexis Denisof

  Character, Stories, Development

  Source: collider.com

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• I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. But when I'm writing, the way the words sound is as important to me as what they mean.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Writing, Mean, Important

  Interview with Jeff Daniels, www.interviewmagazine.com. June 2, 2012.

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• The nation of Dubai banned the movie Charlie's Angles because it's "offensive to the religion of Islam." Apparently, the religion of Islam is offended by anything without a plot.

  Jon Stewart

  Movie, Dubai, Religion Of Islam

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• Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Reality

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

  John Mayer

  Real, Black And White, World

  Song: No Such Thing

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• I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

  John Hawkes

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  John Hawkes, Anthony C. Santore, Michael N. Pocalyko (1977). “A John Hawkes symposium: design and debris”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

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• In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out.

  Margaret Weis

  Book, Character, Writing

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• I calculated the total time that humans have waited for web pages to load. It cancels out all the productivity gains of the information age. Sometimes I think the web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.

  Scott Adams

  Thinking, People, Age

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