Plot Quotes - Page 17

• Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.

  Stephen King

  Real, Writing, Character

  "22 lessons from Stephen King on how to be a great writer". www.businessinsider.com. August 11, 2015.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.

  David Levithan

  Writing, Character, Two

  David Levithan (2013). “Every Day”, p.108, Egmont UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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 afterwards.

  Jessica Stern

  People, Anxiety, Doe

  47 Copy quote

• It’s so real." "Most dreams are. It isn't until you wake up that you see all the plot holes.

  Becca Fitzpatrick

  Dream, Real, Wake Up

  Becca Fitzpatrick (2013). “The Complete Hush, Hush Saga: includes Hush, Hush; Crescendo; Silence and Finale”, p.780, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love enemies, though not in the Christian way. They amuse me, excite my blood. Being always on one’s guard, catching every glance, the significance of every word, guessing at intentions, frustrating their plots, pretending to be tricked, and suddenly, with a shove, upturning the whole enormous and arduously built edifice of their cunning and schemes—that’s what I call life.

  Mikhail Lermontov

  Christian, Blood, Enemy

  32 Copy quote

• Maybe I should have taken a few chances. That's not to say I want to go make Star Wars, but I need to shift my career into the studio world. That's where my head was at when I thought of the original plot.

  Edward Burns

  Stars, War, Taken

  7 Copy quote

• If you were to plot my success or failure, it goes, it very seldom stays on a high plateau.

  Jeff Beck

  Success Or Failure, Ifs

  11 Copy quote

• I don't like to go to the movies to see violence or some kind of spy thing with all kinds of information you have to assimilate to understand the plot.

  Pia Zadora

  Movie, Spy, Information

  7 Copy quote

• Democrats had a secret meeting in Reid's office on Halloween night at 6:15 and they hatched this plot. They said the only way they could get this investigation going was to do it in secret. They say they've been frustrated for a year and a half in getting this investigation into whether the administration twisted the intelligence and they're making no apologies whatsoever for it.

  George Stephanopoulos

  Halloween, Apology, Night

  "Partisan Anger Could Hobble Senate". abcnews.go.com. November 2, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we'd still have to explain the land blip.

  Tom Wigley

  Ocean, Mean, Land

  "Climate Science and Candor". www.wsj.com. November 24, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Open Secret boasts a nifty plot and, in Coroner Fortin, a fascinating protagonist who will likely be around for a long time. Deryn Collier is a talent to watch.

  Giles Blunt

  Long, Secret, Watches

  5 Copy quote

• Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.

  Susan Jacoby

  Religious, Atheist, War

  Susan Jacoby (2005). “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism”, p.70, Macmillan

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business-not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into... rhetoric and plot.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Real, Mean, Escaping

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.120, Bloomsbury Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Plots, true or false, are necessary things, To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.

  John Dryden

  Kings, Political, True Or False

  'Absalom and Achitophel' (1681) pt. 1, l. 83

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• I wonder if Communists occupied in producing plays are not safer than Communists starving to death. I have always felt that whatever your beliefs might be, if you could earn enough to keep body and soul together and had to be pretty busy doing that, you would not be very apt to have time to plot the overthrow of any existing government.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Government, Play, Political

  Eleanor Roosevelt, David Emblidge (2009). “My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt's Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936-1962”, p.39, Da Capo Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.

  Chad Harbach

  Basketball, Soccer, Baseball

  7 Copy quote

• Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

  Agatha Christie

  Ideas, Hats, Odd

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Book, Beginnings And Ends, Lines

  4 Copy quote

• I'm real bent on dialogue. I'm just a little bit crazy and when you put that along with 20 years as a criminal lawyer, it's pretty easy to come up with some interesting plots.

  Christopher Darden

  Crazy, Real, Years

  7 Copy quote

• "Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot."

  Bill Richardson

  Moving, Garden, Novel

  10 Copy quote

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

  Alan Furst

  Writing, Use, Engines

  6 Copy quote

• If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.

  Ann Coulter

  Wish, Say Anything, Terrorist

  Ann Coulter (2007). “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans”, p.186, Crown Forum

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• As president, Clinton sold burial plots in Arlington Cemetery and liberals shrugged it off. What really gets their goat is the autopen. Evidently, the important thing was that every one of those pardons Clinton sold for cash on his last day in office was signed by Bill Clinton personally.

  Ann Coulter

  Office, Important, President

  "Happy Giving Tree Festival To All, And To All A Good Night!". www.anncoulter.com. December 22, 2004.

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most conspiracy theorists dont understand this. But if there really were a CIA plot, no documents would exist.

  Gerald Posner

  Conspiracy, Cia, Documents

  6 Copy quote

• I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.

  Terry Teachout

  Book, Writing, Appreciate

  4 Copy quote