[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.
To save my son, I would plot with the devil himself.
All the plots of hell and commotions on earth have not so much as shaken God's hand to spoil one letter or line he has been drawing.
I started Pilates. I'm the only guy in there. They plot before I get there: 'How can we make John look ridiculous?' Because every exercise involved my legs up, like I'm in the stirrups or something.
All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.
Every search has its own momentum. It is why a search makes such an excellent plot for a film or story.
Discovered W. Somerset Maugham in about 5th grade. Didn't understand the plots, but loved the descriptions.
I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots. . . so I have to do something else.
I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet' but none is planned.
A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.
Once you have invented a character with three dimensions and a voice, you begin to realize that some of the things you'd like him to do to further your plot are things that such a person wouldn't, or couldn't, do.
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
I try not to be too plot-heavy and to balance the dramatic with the comedic.
Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot. . . they don't know what's going to happen to them.
Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.
He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.
I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.