Quotes About Plot

Sentence one is character + vocation + current situation. Sentence two starts with "When" and is what I call the Doorway of No Return––the thing that pushes the Lead into the main plot. Sentence three begins with "Now" and the death (physical, professional, or psychological/spiritual) stakes.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

'Rozabal' was theological while 'Chanakya' is political. Unlike 'Rozabal,' which was about research, the aim of 'Chanakya' is plot, plot, plot, which carries the character. The common DNA, of course, is history.

A scientist is an unlikely character to put at the center of a movie.

I basically like the unpredictability factor. When I watch a film, if it becomes predictable, I lose interest in it.

I think six seasons are telling us one thing about 'Game of Thrones': Everyone should watch their back. No one is safe. That's what I love about the show. I love that it's so unpredictable.

Daily soaps are unpredictable, and one can't predict when the track changes.

I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.

It's very unusual for scenes to be added for a character.

'Saw' is like a big jigsaw puzzle. When you put a jigsaw puzzle together, you put the bottom left corner together first, and then you find yourself working on the upper right corner... That's the way 'Saw' plays out.

Part of the mystique of shows like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' is the idea that they begin with a couple of plot lines, and then a bunch of geniuses improvise dialogue. It's not quite that unstructured and loose. It makes for a good urban myth, but everything's a little more tightly scripted and programmed than that.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me.

There's a stigma that guys hate romance and hate love, but that's not true. Look at 'Iron Man.' There's a whole through-line plot about his relationship with Pepper, and everybody loves it.

'The Secret Agent,' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich - in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash - has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.

Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That's what Congress has come to.

I want to do movies with great stories. The content should be strong.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

It's the story that counts.

To me, it doesn't really matter how big the part is as long as the part is important to the story.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.