Plot Quotes

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. (W. H. Auden)
A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises. View quote
Isaac Bashevis Singer
I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring. View quote
David Brin
Through all the drama - whether damned or not - Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot. View quote
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on Judge not the play before the play is done Her plot hath many changes every day Speaks a new scene the last act crowns the play. View quote
Francis Quarles
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. View quote
Mark Twain
My key interest in choosing scripts is character-driven stories, because there are so many stories that sacrifice character for plot. View quote
Lasse Hallstrom
I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time. View quote
Peter Maxwell Davies
Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently? View quote
Michael Crichton
When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot. (Margaret Atwood)
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. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
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. View quote
William S. Burroughs
As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"-"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare-that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft. View quote
E. M. Forster
Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp. View quote
Roger Ebert
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Life is not a plot; it's in the details. View quote
Jodi Picoult
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations. View quote
Horace Walpole
The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending ... View quote
Martin Amis
I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. View quote
David Brin
Events, time, forms, all propel the inner plot within each of us. (Vanna Bonta)
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working. View quote
Nelson Algren
I drug your ghost across the country, and we plotted out my death. Every city and memory we whispered "Here is where you rest." Well I was determined in Chicago but I dug my teeth into my knees And I settled for a telephone, sang into your machine: "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. View quote
Conor Oberst
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. View quote
James Joyce