Plot Quotes

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

Mark Twain

Despite my affection for subtext and plot and prose at its best... life, it turns out, is nothing more than the finer details.

Bailey Vincent

...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...

John Geddes

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

Sara Sheridan

The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

Victor LaValle

Not telling everything you know is not the same as telling a lie.

Glenda Bailey-Mershon

Some days I feel more like a scribe than a creator. I will have the major points fleshed out, but there is always a turn or two that I didn't see coming, or which came earlier than I expected it to, or not at all...

J. Neven-Pugh

The biggest twist in fiction might be a story ending exactly how you thought it would.

Kevin Focke

Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.

Bonnie Friedman

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

Reif Larsen

He had no big plan for this. He had not prepared for the day when he would be fighting his own work. He had not plotted against his own plots.

Dean F. Wilson

Christ in a Pinata` how have I over complicated the plot?

Scott Parker

A life without trouble and tragedy is boring and not a plot for comedy.

Debasish Mridha

(In reply to the question, 'Would you like some suggestions for a plot for your next book?')There are three problems with getting plot suggestions from other people. The first is that ideas are the easy part of writing; finding the time and energy to get them down on paper is the hard part. I have plenty of ideas already. Which brings me to the second problem: the ideas that excite you, the ones you think would make a terrific book, are not necessarily the same ideas that excite me. And if a writer isn't excited about an idea, she generally doesn't turn out a terrific book, even if the idea is terrific. And the third problem with my using your suggestions is that, theoretically, you could sue me if I did, and that tends to make publishers nervous, which makes it hard to sell a book. So thank you, but no.

Patricia C. Wrede

Don't resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.

Patricia Hamill

The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

Aristotle

A director's dream? No, Bollywood reality in 1995.Business is booming, but cliché's are passée. A different sort of breeze-fresh, young-is unsettling fatigued conventions.

Anupama Chopra

NOTICEPersons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORPer G.G.,Chief of Ordnance

Mark Twain

Taken together the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot though.

Victor LaValle

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

Billy Marshall

We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present.

Kilroy J. Oldster

We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.

Aristotle

Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding, because fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complete set of information. We remember information best when it is delivered in the form of a plot, which is called 'semantic memory.' Stories still serve a definitive purpose and the stronger the purpose, the clearer the story.Fire Up Your Writing Brain

Susan Reynolds

Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned.

Criss Jami

We are all the construction of a story and it is only at the end that we can assess the value of the plot. ("Everybody his story")

Erik Pevernagie

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot...

John Gardner

By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and withoutcharacter and plot, no book can survive.

Craig Hart

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

Sara Sheridan

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

Flannery O'Connor

Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enthusiam, of coherence, the narrator gives to his or her account.

Robert Coles

Character is plot, plot is character.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.

Rebecca McKinsey

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

Patrice Nganang

I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

Alan Moore

Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

Alan Moore

Someone who smiles too much with you can sometime frown too much with you at your back.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one.Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.

Glen Duncan

The life of a writer is directed by a mad impulsive muse, that can tell them to cancel all their storyline: a creative divergent devil.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Aspirations forms the plot of success.

Michael Bassey Johnson

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

Sara Sheridan

I’m a little bit of a plot junkie. I like stakes in my books. Sometimes storytelling gets a bit of a bad rap. “Plot’s easy” or “there’s a higher art we are all aspiring to.” Yes, first and foremost we are all aspiring to that art but I also think it has to have a certain propulsiveness, a certain thing that’s keeping me turning the pages. No matter how great the voice is you will have problems in the plot that will enable somebody to put it down. There are too many things competing for everyone’s attention to allow anyone to put that book down. I don’t want the reviewer to put it down because they’ve got 50 galleys stacked up. I don’t want the reader to put it down.

Lee Boudroux

There's a lot of sex. But it isn't about sex.

Peter Milligan

Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.

Michael Bassey Johnson

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

Marisha Pessl

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It’s what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you’ve lost the plot. Or just lost it.

Amanda Craig

Believe in YourselfWhy must we see something to believe in its existence?The wind itself cannot be seen by man, but all have felt it's gentle touch and watched the mighty trees bow as it swept past.We cannot see love yet its nurturing warmth is the essence of our being and sorrow can touch our very soul. For remorse is like a ripple on the ocean, once given it remains only in the heart of the receiver.Yet all of these cannot be seen only felt. Why then do you doubt your self-worth? For though it cannot cast a reflection in the mirror you have only to look in the eyes of those you love toSee it clearly.Prologue To Kiss a KingTo Kiss a King Copyright © 2017 by Julie Brookshier and Robin WoodsAll rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or use of this work in whole or in part in any form is forbidden without written permission of one or more of the authors.This is a fictional work. Names, characters, places, and events are merely the product of the authors' imaginations or used fictitiously, purely for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or undead or any business establishments, events or places past, present, or future, is entirely coincidental.

Grace Willows

In pursuit of your Purpose, don't miss the plot by concentrating on making money. Rather focus on helping people by presenting solutions to their problems for it is a guaranteed route to making money in the future.

Oscar Bimpong

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

Douglas Coupland

Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.

Kamand Kojouri

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

Kamand Kojouri

The night it fallsThe stars shine throughThe inky blackThat is the cueFor plot demandsThat dreams be sownThe fantasies I have aloneThe words come fastThey flow like wineI am the midnight writer...

Virginia Alison

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

Nothing belongs to itself anymore. These trees are yours because you once looked at them. These streets are yours because you once traversed them. These coffee shops and bookshops, these cafés and bars, their sole owner is you. They gave themselves so willingly, surrendering to your perfume. You sang with the birds and they stopped to listen to you. You smiled at the sheepish stars and they fell into your hair. The sun and moon, the sea and mountain, they have all left from heartbreak. Nothing belongs to itself anymore. You once spoke to Him, and then God became yours. He sits with us in darkness now to plot how to make you ours.” K.K.

Kamand Kojouri

You need a revolution in your life so as to know the plot of the devil and discover the thoughts of the Lord toward you

Sunday Adelaja

And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.

Franz Kafka

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Jeffrey Eugenides

But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?

Shannon Hale

I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. . . . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay?

J.R. Moehringer

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the

Philip Pullman

I am a loser in my own plot, but I might be the hero in someone else's plot.

Vann Chow

1 2 Next

Plot Quotes

Related Topics