Plot Quotes - Page 24

• As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

  Andre Dubus

  Philosophy, Writing, Character

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• Most of us live in a fog. It's like life is a movie we arrived to 20 minutes late. You know something important seems to be going on. But we can't figure out the story. We don't know what part we're supposed to play or what the plot is.

  John Eldredge

  Fog, Play, Important

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

  Geoffrey S. Fletcher

  Driving, Film

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Elizabeth George

  Character, Events, Challenging The Status Quo

  Elizabeth George (2011). “Write Away: One Novelist's Approach To Fiction and the Writing Life: One Novelist's Approach To Fiction and the Writing Life”, p.46, Hachette UK

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• 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.

  Wendy Cope

  Happy Life, Thinking, Arise

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• I've learned to look like I'm listening to long confusing plots of cartoons and comic books when I'm actually sound asleep or making grocery shopping lists in my head.

  Patricia Heaton

  Book, Shopping, Long

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• The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.

  Anne Rice

  Character, Should Have, Principles

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

  Charles Francis Richter

  Devil, Lucky, Devices

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• I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.

  J. K. Rowling

  Writing, Outlining, Decided

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• Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

  Will Self

  Art, Fall, Character

  "Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson - review" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 19, 2012.

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• Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

  William Shatner

  Art, Writing, Character

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• I'm in an odd place right now in New York where I routinely get trashed by every daily drama critic and have a few allies among weekly/monthly drama critics, and you sort of plot these things out and figure it out. But it's just what any writer goes through, periods of favor, periods of disfavor. And the trick is just to keep writing and to not let an obsession.

  Tony Kushner

  New York, Drama, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion [...]. If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?

  Ruth Hurmence Green

  Beautiful, Christian, Atheist

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• There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Believe, Eye, Pyramids

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• Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.

  John Steinbeck

  Home, Independent, Other Worlds

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.499, Penguin

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• It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

  Frank O'Hara

  Beautiful, Finals, Beloved

  Frank O'Hara (2005). “In Memory of My Feelings: A Selection of Poems”, p.65, The Museum of Modern Art

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• Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

  Jessica Stern

  Light, People, Feelings

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• But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Moving, Blow, People

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• [On Edna Ferber's Ice Palace] ... the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Character, Ice

  Dorothy Parker (2004). “Dorothy Parker in Her Own Words”, Taylor Trade Publishing

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• I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.

  Sara Zarr

  Character, Events, Stories

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• A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Lying, Needs, Humans

  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Marcelle Clements (2013). “The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings”, p.60, Penguin

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• I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

  Howard Hawks

  Character, Mean, Thinking

  Howard Hawks, Scott Breivold (2006). “Howard Hawks: Interviews”, p.41, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• History meets romance meets suspense! Compelling, original and wildly romantic, Beatriz Williams’ prose is stunning and the plot edge-of-your-seat gripping. OVERSEAS is an absolute triumph—I loved every page.

  Tilly Bagshawe

  Romance, Triumph, Suspense

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

  Zoe Kazan

  Character, Thinking, Action

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I think situations are more important than plot and character.

  Harry Mathews

  Character, Thinking, Important

  "Agent Provocateur: Harry Matthews with Johannah Rogers". The Brooklyn Rail Interview, brooklynrail.org. June 1, 2005.

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