Top 1200 Plot Lines Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

[E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

As my mom always said, 'You'd rather have smile lines than frown lines.'

I love good stories; you have to have a good plot - characters which intertwine with a good plot.

It is possible to combine a story line and plot line in the same work. Usually the storylines comes first, serving as a background to the plot line, but not always.

Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.

The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.

One thing I've really never had a problem with was memorizing lines. Most of the time I don't memorize the lines until we're on the set shooting the scene.

I didn't want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can't just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

While I've written in the POV (point of view) of adolescent characters before... I never have had to create novels in which those characters not only drive the plot, but also are instrumental in resolving whatever issue the plot deals with.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.

They do the soaps differently in Mexico. You just have to know the storyline and not memorize the lines. There would be someone feeding you lines while you were performing.

I'm a pantser. I try to plot. I always try to plot. I end up with a few paragraphs that basically outline the gist of the story.But I never get much beyond that. I get too impatient to write.

Practice your improv more than learn your lines. 'Cause there's no way you'll be able to learn all those lines in a short time. You have to realize what you know and what you don't know - and what you don't know, just come up with three alternate lines or improv that you can put in that spot.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through.

I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.

Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control.

But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

I think acting, oftentimes it's not about lines, it's about spaces in between lines and expressions on people's faces and their relationships. You can tell your own story, or a story that you're interested in, even if the lines don't necessarily point you in that direction.

I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.

Not only a great game, 'Uncharted 2' raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.

I think it's important to have open lines of communication and I think the best lines of communication are two-way lines.

If Slater were someone else, Kevin would merely be the poor victim of a horrible plot. Unless he was killed by Slater, in which case he would be the dead victim of a horrible plot

After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.

My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.

I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It's very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.

In this age, I don't care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are: if you cannot create harmony - even vicious harmony - on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.

Sometimes the lines in a song are lines you wish you could text-message somebody in real life.

I have got lines on my forehead, so be it, the laugh lines add to my personality.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.

You can only see 'Star Wars' for the first time once, and people are watching it again and again and again, and it's a testament to the strength beyond the plot twists that it has. The narrative strength that it has is that it can be enjoyed even though you know the biggest plot elements in it.

I've always believed that if you are precise in your thoughts, it's not the lines you say that are important - it's what exists between the lines. What I'm compelled by most is that transparency of thought, what is left unspoken.

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.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

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.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

As writers and readers, we're drawn to conflict. It's that ancient theory of plot that's written on the whiteboard during every fiction workshop, characters who want something overcoming obstacles as a way to create narrative momentum and suspense. So there's that, that trauma gives us more plot.

Plot is just not my gift. I'm fascinated with complex characters, and that doesn't mix well with complex plots. And by the way, when the plot is simple, you can move one piece around and make it feel fresh. Hell or High Water's a good example: I don't tell you why the brothers are robbing the bank.

The first act is the easiest to plot. The second act is always the hardest to plot. Generally a good, you know, sometimes the third act can be difficult because you can get into a rut in the third act - everybody runs to their Corvette, has a chase, and you catch the bad guy.

We're still expected to color within the lines of accepted femininity, and women who step out of those lines are usually attacked, whether verbally or physically.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

I use this method to bring emotion into my performance. I recite my lines in English first, and then switch back to the original lines when shooting begins.

And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

I think in general, lines are a bad idea. Especially if they sound like lines. Everyone's immediate reaction is to just kind of cringe a little bit.

I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.

You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.

When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

People who are not leaders automatically gravitate toward lines--limitations set by others. Many people are taught this in kindergarten when they are instructed to stay within the lines while coloring. But leaders are more creative than that. They look for options and opportunities. They try to take things in a new direction, or beyond the limit. Progress and innovation are made by people who think without lines.