A Quote by Maira Kalman

I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

Maira Kalman

Quote Topics

Anything Beginning End Idea In The Beginning Know Like Means Middle Plot Plots Stand Starts

Quote Author

Maira Kalman
American - Author
Born: 1949

Man no longer lives in the beginning--he has lost the beginning. Now he finds he is in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that he is in the middle, coming from the beginning and going towards the end. He sees that his life is determined by these two facets, of which he knows only that he does not know them

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

With a film, you know the beginning, middle and end of your character's arc. But on a TV show, you have no idea where they're going to end up.

Michael Eklund

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.

Spike Jonze

Grief doesn't have a plot. It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.

Ann Hood

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

C. V. Wedgwood

The hardest part is always the middle of anything because at that point, on some unconscious level, you have to figure out what it's about and why you're doing it and what it means. You don't know that in the beginning.

T.C. Boyle

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don't know if the art of stand-up will survive. Stand-up seems dated. Now you can do a mini-movie or a short with a beginning, middle, and end. A guy standing there seems a little old - especially when you can go on the Internet and see 'Funny or Die.'

George Lopez

The song, 'Life is Better,' is about hip-hop. It's about my love for hip-hop. And, you know, I go through all the artists from the beginning to the end, you know. And, well, not to the end, but since the beginning to now, you know.

Q-Tip

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.

Gertrude Stein

TV is the only thing that's really alive, because it's happening as you go. You don't know the end, so another day brings a new life to it. Unlike a play, unlike a movie, where you know the beginning, middle, and end.

Margo Martindale

[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know.

Allen Ginsberg

I feel confident that we will have a beginning, middle and end, in this season, and it was wise of NBC to then call it what it really is, which is a mini-series. "24" is a really good example, in that there was a definitive beginning, middle and end for the first season. They had a slightly different format than we have, but the second season just retained Jack Bauer and a few other players, with the same basic format and idea, but it was a completely different show.

Remi Aubuchon

There are in truth three states of the converted: the beginning, the middle, and the perfection. In the beginning they experience the charms of sweetness; in the middle the contests of temptation; and in the end the fullness of perfection.