Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Hilary Mantel

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulating our minds. This is one reason IQs have been going up.

Alex Tabarrok

Wit Vision Up

Television is much more complex, brain-challenging and involved than it used to be. It's almost impossible to watch a television show from 15 years ago; it's just too boring. I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulating our minds. This is one reason IQs have been going up.

Alex Tabarrok

Years Ago Years Year

The winner must promote social jusitce, remove corruption and discrmination, and stand against political, cultural and economic plots.

Ali Khamenei

Winner Win Us

I do not believe evil men are led by God. I believe there are plots of evil. We live in a sinful world, and there are a lot of things that happen as a result of sin.

Anne Graham Lotz

Men God World

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

Anthony Horowitz

You Writing Ways

As long as the plots keep arriving from outer space, I'll go on with my virgins.

Barbara Cartland

Space Wit T

It gets harder and harder to make movies about human beings. These movies are like an endangered species. Everything is 'simplify, simplify' now. How many movies have sub-plots anymore?

Barry Levinson

Movies Anger Very

There are those who maintain that in this world women have no right to interfere in the affairs of state, in politics, in plots and counter-plots. Others that are who, more chivalrous, are willing to admit that women have as much right to act, think, and speak as men.

Belle Boyd

Women Politics Men

Every couple I know has side-by-side grave plots, but when we do it we're the biggest weirdos on the block.

Billy Bob Thornton

Weirdo Weird Very

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

Billy West

Cool Wit Things

I am not opposed to government efforts to stop terrorist plots. We are still seared by the memory of 9/11, and we should be.

Bob Beckel

Men Government Top

Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.

Camilla Lackberg

Men Home Wing

I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.

Caroline B. Cooney

Writers Writer Write

I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.

Caroline B. Cooney

Love Yards Yard

Today, somewhere in America, more foreclosures. More auctions. Another farmer plots his own death. And another. There is an art to making your death by combine look like an accident.

Carolyn Chute

Death Art Your

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.

Charles Bukowski

Work Love Written

I was lucky because logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.

Charles Francis Richter

Vice Use Us

Logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.

Charles Francis Richter

Vice T Plots

Fox News and other Trump-friendly media long ago became fever wards of speculation and conspiracy-mongering as they obsessed over plots from the Deep State.

Charlie Sykes

War Trump T

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

I'm real bent on dialogue. I'm just a little bit crazy and when you put that along with 20 years as a criminal lawyer, it's pretty easy to come up with some interesting plots.

Christopher Darden

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

Claire Tomalin

I almost write to formula, because there's a historical beginning, then the plots get convoluted.

Clive Cussler

No matter how many plots we uncover and disrupt, no matter how many terrorist organizations we degrade or destroy, another individual or group will rise to take their place.

Cofer Black

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

Daniel Espinosa

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

Darin Strauss

I look for material that both interest me and challenges me. If I am drawn to the material and I have to work hard at it, the characters and the plots reflect the hours and hours of research.

David Baldacci

If you lift the romantic element out of my plots, you still have fully formed mysteries. In the same fashion, if you pull the mystery out of a historical romance, you are left with a perfectly satisfying story.

Deanna Raybourn

I thought at first that I might write mysteries, but then I said, 'Mysteries have plots, and I'm not sure I can do that yet.'

Diana Gabaldon

I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.

Donald Miller

The funny thing is, though I write mysteries, it is the one genre in adult fiction I never read. I read Nancy Drew, of course, when I was a kid, but I think the real appeal is as a writer because I'm drawn to puzzly, complicated plots.

Elise Broach

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

Emma Donoghue

The same way that some people can play the piano, I can do plots! They just come!

Francine Pascal

Liberal democracies like ours seem, for the most part, to have learned how to avoid meticulously planned mass-casualty plots with the complexity and scale of 9/11. But they don't know how to keep their citizens safe at night clubs and concerts, in supermarkets, on beachfront promenades, from truck drivers.

George Packer

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

Gilbert Murray

Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.

H. P. Lovecraft

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

Henry Miller

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Hilary Mantel

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

Iain Banks

I don't think I could, with a straight face, describe myself as a completely positive person, but I'm not overly negative, either. On the whole, most writers think plots through to their consequences, and it's not always a sunny place. I have an occupational temperament for anxiety.

James Lasdun

We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

Janette Turner Hospital

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

Jeffery Deaver

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

Jennifer Egan

There is nothing new, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare to every romcom ever made, we're just reimagining the same 12 story plots over and over again - so what makes people keep watching and listening? It's all about the character.

Jeremy Renner

The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.

Jill Lepore

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

Jim Jarmusch

As a former career intelligence professional, I have a profound appreciation for the value of intelligence. Intelligence disrupts terrorist plots and thwarts attacks. Intelligence saves lives.

John O. Brennan

The intelligence investigation under the leadership of Senator Church, which I know has helped cause this investigation by you, points out that the agencies did not disclose certain facts to us and that certain plots were going on.

John Sherman Cooper

Although 'L.A. Confidential' is a long movie, there's never a moment when you think, 'I'm loving this... but when's dinner?' Each time I see it, I discover something I hadn't noticed before. It has a tremendous skill in developing all the subplots.

Julian Fellowes