Plot Quotes - Page 29

• I think I made a mistake with [Jane] Austen by reading all six in a row. There are similarities to the plots so by the time I got to the last one I could anticipate what was happening too easily. But her characterizations are amazing.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Mistake, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• For me, the lives of children and teens are interesting - they are always changing. There's just so much to sort through. All of this makes for good plots and complex characters.

  Renee Watson

  Children, Character, Interesting

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• With a novel, you have the reader with you a lot longer, and you owe him a lot more. Obviously you have to have a plot - I say "obviously," although I think a lot of fiction doesn't, and nothing seems to happen. But to me, there should be something that happens, and it should be at least vaguely plausible. And because the readers are going to be with these characters for a long time, you have to get to know them and like them and want to know what happens to them.

  Dave Barry

  Character, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

  Dave Barry

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

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• I think that the government has an obligation to monitor communications that could reveal a plot to murder millions of Americans. Monitoring bowel movements? I'll leave that to some of the gay bloggers, that's much more their style.

  Jeff Gannon

  Communication, Gay, Thinking

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• Objective truth itself is sometimes often seen as a right wing Republican-Christian plot to take over the government (though the rhetoric is cleverer than that, that's the bottom line).

  Peter Kreeft

  Christian, Wings, Government

  Source: brandonvogt.com

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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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• Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

  Umberto Eco

  Country, Special, Quality

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• War isn't a TV show with plot twists to keep the viewers interested. The proliferation of images and blanket media coverage have suffocated the life out of old-style photojournalism.

  David Burnett

  War, Media, Tv Shows

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• Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

  Terry Pratchett

  Character, Voice, Pages

  Terry Pratchett (2014). “A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction”, p.107, Random House

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• The plot details of B movies are irrational: accept that people do things that are contradictory, against their own best interests, have short term aims & limited attention span, and do incredibly stupid things while things blow up. Apart from things blowing up, this is just like the music industry.

  Robert Fripp

  Stupid, Blow, People

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• I continue to explain that plot inconsistencies in B movies are consistent, and should not be allowed to undermine one's enjoyment of the action, nor the fundamental credibility of the storyline: the good & bad guys are clearly delineated & easily recognizable, the hero duffs over the baddies, things blow up loudly & spectacularly, the good guy wins. Entirely credible.

  Robert Fripp

  Hero, Blow, Winning

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• The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want [...] Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help.

  Bruce Schneier

  Real, Writing, Scare

  "Refuse to be Terrorized". www.wired.com. August 24, 2006.

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• Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

  Don DeLillo

  Murder, Effects, Knows

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.323, Pan Macmillan

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• A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

  Don DeLillo

  Real, Book, Wind

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.103, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• One of my fave TV shows is Into the Badlands because martial arts staged well and magically and saturated colours and eye candy and coherent plot and world building. It has a strong diverse cast.

  Justine Larbalestier

  Strong, Art, Eye

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I need time to develop the idea into a plot before I talk about it.

  James Thayer

  Ideas, Needs, I Need Time

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• I really like the spooky twists and the intense mystery. I think the various plot devices work really well for TV, but they are still also in the spirit of Pretty Little Liars as a whole. I also really liked Spencer's breakdown in the previous season after Toby betrayed her. The girls have had breakdowns of sorts in the books, so it was fun to see that on-screen.

  Sara Shepard

  Girl, Fun, Liars

  Source: www.seventeen.com

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• I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into - I think there are about 300 of them i've published by now).

  Gregory Orr

  Writing, Thinking, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted yourself in a plot corner.

  Janet Evanovich

  Writing, Firsts, Realizing

  Interview with Brian Sherwin, briansherwin-artcritic.blogspot.ru. October 31, 2010.

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• For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

  Don DeLillo

  Religious, Book, Writing

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• I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.

  Matthew Tobin Anderson

  Writing, Thinking, Circles

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• While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe.

  Mark Steyn

  Fall, Two, America

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• What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.

  John Baldessari

  Horse, Fall, Kissing

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• It would be so easy to lose the plot now. It's not about achieving something for its own sake, and taking pictures for their own sake. But to make conscious decisions and choices, and it includes this constant questioning - Why am I taking pictures? Because really, the world is... it has pictures enough. I mean, there are enough pictures out there.

  Wolfgang Tillmans

  Mean, Questioning Why, Choices

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