Plot Quotations | Page 5

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

You could write the whole plot on a postcard. We do the rest.

You can receive information about the broad outline of a specific plot and not have enough granularity to the information that allows for the type of follow-up that law enforcement can do,

The main thing that I learned from editing is that most people, when they're making a film, they start too early into the story. They will try to set up the characters, they will try to establish things before the plot actually starts.

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

It's like low-budget filmmaking - a focus on dialogue and relationships over plot. Quirky. Improv.

The embrace of plot has allowed something like the Oprah book club phenomenon to emerge.

The German police should be applauded for arresting these men before the alleged criminal plot was put into action. The potential rewards for internet crime are high, and we are seeing organized international gangs becoming more sophisticated in the ways in which they attempt to steal information from online banking users. Computer crime authorities around the world need to work closely with each other to break apart these criminal gangs and bring them to justice.

The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.

I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.

I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I'm now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

I try not to be too plot-heavy and to balance the dramatic with the comedic.

One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.

Carney is like a graveyard where everyone already owns their plots and has built houses on top of them.

I don't usually read my reviews. I've noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don't seem to be bothered by the complications at all.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique -- 'What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?'

Once somebody's aware of a plot, it's like a bone sticking out. If it breaks through the skin, it's very ugly.

From plots and treasons Heaven preserve my years, But save me most from my petitioners. Unsatiate as the barren womb or grave; God cannot grant so much as they can crave.

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

Welcome to the real world, she said to me. Condescendingly. Take a seat. Take your life. Plot it out in black and white.

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

There is only one plot-things are not what they seem.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.

There are only so many plots in the world. It's how they unfold that makes them interesting.

In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language... the screenplay with dialogue, plot...

He obtained from Congress the right to borrow from the people by selling to it the 'bonds' of States ... and the Government and the nation escaped the plots of the foreign financiers. They understood at once, that the United States would escape their grip. The death of Lincoln was resolved upon.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

I like fast plots with things that explode.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

To save my son, I would plot with the devil himself.

The Monkees was a straight sitcom, we used the same plots that were on the other situation comedies at the time. So the music wasn't threatening, we weren't threatening.

Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don't.

The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

I would love to travel to the future to plot out some things so there's no more guess work.

Through all the drama - whether damned or not -Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control.

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

The fantastic thing about the theatre is that it can make something be seen that's invisible, and that's where my interest in theatre is- that you can be watching this thing happening with actors and costumes and light and set and language, and even plot, and something emerges from beyond that, and that's the image part that I'm looking for, that sort of added dimension.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

I really felt sometimes like I was physically pulling the plot, and it was heavy. I'm sure it didn't look great that I was going into my dressing room at lunch.

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

Shakespeare, who never could think up a plot by himself, found this one [Macbeth] in Holinshed's Chronicles, changing it just enough so that no one would recognize the source. He didn't count on the resourcefulness of modern scholars, who have to discover things like this to become associate professors.

Terrorist bombers on the left, fascist plots on the right.

Spy plots are hard, really hard.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.

My muse is an ungrateful harlot who’s abandoned me to actually come up with my own plots.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don't remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

I'm told my SF is of the hard variety and my Fantasy is romantic but hopefully all the characters are strong and the plots are lively.

The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.

Everyone must hoe his plot daily...

Satan cannot deny but that great wonders have been wrought by prayer. As the spirit of prayer goes up, so his kingdom goes down. Satan's strategems against prayer are three. First, if he can, he will keep thee from prayer. If that be not feasible, secondly, he will strive to interrupt thee in prayer. And, thirdly, if that plot takes not, he will labour to hinder the success of thy prayer.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickenswith the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.

You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That's our role.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.

Rashly, And praised be rashness for it--let us know, Our indiscretion sometime serves us well When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot.

The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.

PLOT is CHARACTER revealed by ACTION.

I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot

To honor life, we must be willing to grow through what we don't know yet, and outgrow what we know no longer fits us. We must be willing to give in to the process, moment by moment, realizing a new plot may be unfolding.

Europe is being absolutely swamped and destroyed with the crime and the problems, and it could be some sinister plot.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

Do not carry a spirit of contradiction, for it is to be freighted with stupidity and with peevishness, and your intelligence should plot against it; though it may well be the mark of mental genius to see objection, a wrangler about everything cannot

I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot, success is my only option, failure's not.

Character is plot, plot is character.

I love a life whose plot is simple.

The best laid plot can injure its maker, and often a man's perfidy will rebound on himself.

Nor is there any law more just, than that he who has plotted death shall perish by his own plot.

Persons 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 AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

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

The meek shall inherit the earth - a 6 foot plot above them.

Events, time, forms, all propel the inner plot within each of us.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

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.

It always seems to someone outside the business that it is very difficult to write for a comedy show because it must be done quickly. Actually, it is much easier to write this humor than to do a joke or a show from scratch, because the audience knows the plot. Just mention what is going on and then deliver the punch line.