Quotes About Plot

Most movies, once the action starts there's no more characters. You say a couple of dumb lines and then there's just explosions until the end.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

Baseball is part of America's plot, part of America's mysterious, underlying design-the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life.

I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.

How plotless real life was!

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

It's easy now, now that it's a story. When you were going through it, it was life. Always much harder to get the plot line on.

For each of us, life is a story. There are characters, conflicts, plot developments, crises, interludes, twists and resolutions. Sometimes the story makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. But there's still value in the story itself, even when you can't add up the parts and understand the whole. A good story can lead you toward insight perhaps wisdom, regardless of whether or not you fully understand it. Maybe that's why storytelling has always been so important to me.

Mike wished Mr. Burden had chosen another time to be murdered. He was beginning to see that the hour of dressing for dinner might have been expressly designed for persons who need a quiet spell for the commission of crime.

If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

Without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character.

Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions.

Novices in the art attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot.

Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.

If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

By plot, I here mean the arrangement of the incidents.

The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.

Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality--namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.

But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' is an epistolary novel - one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.

I'd always thought that if Python was going to go on at all, it'd be nice to get into storylines.

Games, by nature, have more plot options and non-linear qualities than TV and film.

The film 'The Queen' came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana's death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.