Plot Quotes

1. "At the Theatre: To the Lady Behind MeDear Madam, you have seen this play;I never saw it till today.You know the details of the plot,But, let me tell you, I do not.The author seeks to keep from meThe murderer's identity,And you are not a friend of hisIf you keep shouting who it is.The actors in their funny wayHave several funny things to say,But they do not amuse me moreIf you have said them just before;The merit of the drama lies,I understand, in some surprise;But the surprise must now be smallSince you have just foretold it all.The lady you have brought with youIs, I infer, a half-wit too,But I can understand the pieceWithout assistance from your niece.In short, foul woman, it would suitMe just as well if you were mute;In fact, to make my meaning plain,I trust you will not speak again.And—may I add one human touch?—Don't breathe upon my neck so much."
Author: A.P. Herbert

2. "I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

3. "But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It's got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet's tectonic plates -hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents - but thy can't plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts.The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole"
Author: Anderson Cooper

4. "I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges."
Author: Anita Desai

5. "'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns."
Author: Berkeley Breathed

6. "But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?"
Author: Brian Selznick

7. "YA heroines can have romances that are subplots: can have goals other than getting/keeping a man: can put their lovers second. JUST LIKE YAheroes DO!"
Author: Celine Kiernan

8. "A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen."
Author: Charles Baxter

9. ". . . then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we paused to think — 'What to do tomorrow?' and the answer was always, 'As we please . . ."
Author: CrimethInc.

10. "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."
Author: David Zucker

11. "Now, an hour later, Ethan stood at a window, gazing at the rain, like threads of seed pearls, accessorizing the hills of Bel Air. Watching weather clarified his thinking. Sometimes only nature felt real, while all human monuments and actions seemed to be the settings and the plots of dreams."
Author: Dean Koontz

12. "I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling."
Author: Donald Miller

13. "I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it."
Author: Dorothy Fields

14. "[E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

15. "My generation grew up with an imposed myth: the myth of happily ever after -- (and makes you do the same). Whether we wrote this myth or its opposite -- there is no prince, and ever if there is, he never comes, and even if he comes, he never makes you come -- we were still seeing our lives in terms of this myth. Pro-prince or anti-prince, the terms of the debate were defined -- and not by us. We tried to write other myths -- some day my princess will come or I am my own princess so there --but they were all derivative. The armature of plot was the same. We were reacting, not creating. We had not expanded the terms in which we saw our lives."
Author: Erica Jong

16. "The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

17. "What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?"
Author: George Villiers

18. "Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents' names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it's the only way to truly keep your child. Kid grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground."
Author: Gillian Flynn

19. "There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart."
Author: Glen Cook

20. "They were...no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved."
Author: Gloria Goldreich

21. "Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot"
Author: Gore Vidal

22. "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."
Author: Graham Nelson

23. "The first unanalysed impression that most readers receive from Jane Eyre is that it has a very violent atmosphere. If this were simply the effect of the plot and the imagined events then sensation novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto or Mrs Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho ought to produce it even more powerfully.But they do not. Nor do they even arouse particularly strong reader responses. Novelists like Charlotte Brontë or D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, are able quite quickly to provoke marked reactions of sympathy or hostility from readers. The reason, apparently, isthat the narrator's personality is communicating itself through the style with unusual directness."
Author: Ian Gregor

24. "She gathers my half of the blankets around her and curls up against the wall. She will sleep for hours more, dreaming endless landscapes and novas of colour both gorgeous and frightening. If I stayed she would wake up and describe them to me. All the mad plot twists and surrealist imagery, so vivid to her while so meaningless to me. There was a time when I treasured listening to her, when I found the commotion in her soul bitter-sweet and lovely, but I can no longer bear it."
Author: Isaac Marion

25. "The writer and the dreamer have so much in common: They can't control the plot, they are always part of the story or the dream."
Author: Isabel Allende

26. "I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it's because I don't want to keep them for myself. You don't like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I'm wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending."
Author: J.C. Lillis

27. "I went to bed last night utterly dejected; I thought I was never going to amount to anything, and that you had thrown away your money for nothing. But what do you think? I woke up this morning with a beautiful new plot in my head, and I've been going about all day planning my characters, just as happy as I could be. No one can ever accuse me of being a pessimist! If I had a husband and twelve children swallowed by an earthquake one day, I'd bob up smilingly the next morning and commence to look for another set. ~Jershua Abbott"
Author: Jean Webster

28. "This isn't a book. This isn't a paranormal fantasy or whatever the hell it is you read. There is no set plot or clear idea of where any of this is going. The enemies aren't obvious. There are no guaranteed happy endings."
Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout

29. "Graves aren't for the dead. They're for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave's purpose was fulfilled and ended. I suppose if you looked at it that way, one might as well decorate one's grave with an enormous statue or a giant temple. It gave people something to talk about, at least. Although, following that logic, I would need to have a roller coaster, or maybe a Tilt-A-Whirl constructed over my own grave when I died. Then even after my loved ones had moved on, people could keep having fun for years and years. Of course, I'd need a slightly larger plot."
Author: Jim Butcher

30. "On the proper role of coincidence in fiction—more exactly in storymaking, ... Aristotle declares in effect that since real life now and then includes unlikely coincidences both idle and consequential ... a storymaker may legitimately deploy such a possible-though-improbable happenstance to begin the tale or to give its plot-screws an early turn. Thereafter, however, the Plausible (even when strictly impossible) is ever to be preferred to the Possible-but-Unlikely; and in the resolution of a plot, most particularly, coincidence ought to be eschewed. Fate in fiction, decrees the great A, ought to flow from character and situation, not from chance; let no god on wires drop down at climax-time to rescue the storymaker from whatever dramaturgical corner his want of experience, talent, or judgment has painted him into."
Author: John Barth

31. "Dickens' plots are his most discardable properties, and often have to be pushed aside to let the strange poetry of his imagination emerge."
Author: John Carey

32. "I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

33. "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."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

34. "As soon as I saw that doll all splotched with mud, I saw myself, saw how soiled I was. Or thought I was. From that minute on, I felt liked I'd slipped through a hole in God's pocket. Just took a dive right into the dirt and was lost forever."Greg kissed Faron's hair. "You never hit the dirt. You just slid from one pocket to another. That's what I did too - I took a journey I was meant to take. I know that now."Absorbing this, Faron slanted a puzzled look at Greg. "Which pocket do you suppose I landed in?""This one. The one we're in together. The one I believe we'll stay in."Faron felt a thrill of optimism in his heart. "I never thought of it that way.""I never did either. Until today." Greg once again settled onto Faron's chest. His cheek moved noticeable into a smile. "God isn't small, honey. God has a lot of freakin' pockets. And we just found the one we belong in."
Author: K.Z. Snow

35. "A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law."
Author: Kurt Huber

36. "Maar plotseling begon mijn hart sneller te slaan, mijn hand beefde en drukte de zijne; ik werd warm en met mijn ogen zocht ik in het halfduister zijn blik en plotseling voelde ik, dat ik niet bang voor hem was, maar dat deze angst liefde was, een nieuwe liefde, groter en inniger dan vroeger."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

37. "What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the 'who' will always matter more than the 'what.' It's fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it's happening to."
Author: Lisa Gardner

38. "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.'"
Author: Louis Sachar

39. "I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

40. "So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what."
Author: Margaret Atwood

41. "While some dismiss the Bible as a dusty old book, I view its pages as portals to adventure. Not only is the book chock-full of clever plots and compelling stories, but it's laced with historical insights and literary beauty. When I open the Scripture, I imagine myself exploring an ancient kingdom . . . With every encounter, I learn something new about their life journeys and am reminded that the Bible is more than a record of the human quest for God: it's the revelation of God's quest for us." - Scouting the Divine"
Author: Margaret Feinberg

42. "I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going."
Author: Meg Rosoff

43. "The bag was a hybrid I had picked up at a store called Suitcase City while I was plotting my comeback. [...] It had a logo on it -- a mountain ridgeline with the words "Suitcase City" printed across it like the Hollywood sign. Above it, skylights swept the horizon, completing the dream image of desire and hope. I think that logo was the real reason I liked the bag. Because I knew Suitcase City wasn't a store. It was a place. It was Los Angeles."
Author: Michael Connelly

44. "Beginning with sin instead of creation is like trying to read a book by opening it in the middle: You don't know the characters and can't make sense of the plot."
Author: Nancy Pearcey

45. "You do not want to make this guy mad. You see him sitting there all cool and calm, but underneath, he's thinking, he's plotting. I'm telling you, it's not normal. He's like Michael from 'The Godfather.' - Kevin Johnson on David Stern"
Author: R.E. Graswich

46. "Details are where a theory can be held together or fall apart. The same is true about a plot."
Author: Sarah Richards

47. "En una ocasión le dije a un editor que cuando escribes un libro debes conseguir que el lector se enamore del personaje principal, que odie a su enemigo de la misma forma que él lo hace, y que llore cuando muere quién no lo merece. Lo que olvidé decirle entonces, debido a mis escasos años e inocencia, fue que el amor es y será siempre el tema por excelencia en una novela, y si lo unes a la venganza, la muerte, y el pasado, puedes crear una bomba de relojería a punto de explotar."
Author: Silvia Ibáñez Cambra

48. "Of course, the writer can impose control; It's just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however... that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration."
Author: Stephen King

49. "Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest."
Author: Stephen King

50. "With six weeks' worth of recuperation time, you'll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And listen--if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us."
Author: Stephen King

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