Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My task is to tell a story with the music. I always like to have themes in terms of characters or plots, and things that can tell a story always interest me the most.
I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.
I've learned to look like I'm listening to long confusing plots of cartoons and comic books when I'm actually sound asleep or making grocery shopping lists in my head.
The Monkees was a straight sitcom, we used the same plots that were on the other situation comedies at the time. So the music wasn't threatening, we weren't threatening.
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.
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.
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.
I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.
I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction, and I really liked doing those, and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
There are several cool cross-overs between 'Blue Shift,' 'Opposing Force' and 'Half-Life.' The plots are all designed to work nicely with themselves and the observant player will catch many cross-references.
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.
As I continue to write as M. O'Keefe, I find myself following darker story lines. Plots I might have flinched away from I now rush toward. Using sex as a tool to tell women's stories is endlessly fascinating.
I always like to think of music as if you were to turn the picture off, actually. Just by listening to the piece of music, there's a story there and a connection to the characters and the plots and all of that.
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.
'Namukku Parkkaan' is a family drama that plots the story of a couple's struggles to build a house of their own. The character I play is every man's dream wife, one who supports her husband through thick and thin.
Despite constant vilifying by the media and congressional threats to take away the tools needed to uncover plots, FBI agents and CIA officers work silently around the clock and risk their own lives to keep us safe.
After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.
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.
Certain personal issues forced me stay away from movies for a while but that does not mean I was idle and cut away from cinema. It was during that break that I wrote two books and found the time to dream about new scripts and plots.
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.
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.
I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.
Bradbury would have said his plots are myths and metaphors that tell stories about the human condition. That's what sets him apart from other science-fiction writers: He doesn't write about technology, but about the human heart and psyche.
The utilization of flat roofs as 'grounds' offers us a means of re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony deserts of our great towns; for the plots from which she has been evicted to make room for buildings can be given back to her up aloft.
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.
Perhaps summer's ephemeral nature is what inspires us to embrace the beach read. We tell ourselves that these twisted plots and wild characters are literary ice cream sundaes - extravagant treats that aren't as calorie-laden when we're wearing flip flops.
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.
There are only so many stories in the world... Duplication of plots is bound to happen because most writers have read very extensively in their genre and have become aware they are adding an extra layer to the meta-narrative, finding a new spin on the original.
I describe my plots as follows; A character is walking down the street when all of a sudden a piano falls on them. They spend the rest of the story digging out from under that piano. How they dig, how long and how well, this all depends entirely on the character.
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.
I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.
Our enemy is motivated by hatred and will not stop planning more plots against until they are ultimately defeated. Today was an important and necessary victory in the war, but there is a long road ahead. We must remain committed if we are to succeed and protect our liberty.
What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the 'who' will always matter more than the 'what.' It's fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it's happening to.
It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots.
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.
I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.
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.
I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'
The brilliant thing about swimming is that, while you're doing it, there's nothing else you could be getting on with, like the ironing or sorting out the children. My mind goes into free-float mode; some of the best ideas for plots come into my head while I'm ploughing up and down the pool.
Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man. I'm a bit of a throwback to the days of black and white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic - they gave rise to a type of anti-hero that maybe I suit better.
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.
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.
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.
The makers love to show women being oppressed, and the audience also loves watching these stories. I'm sorry to say, but a large portion of the audience that watches these shows are women. They make women cry and abuse in the shows and women audiences are glued to such plots. I don't understand this syndrome.
By comparison, 'The Secret Agent' is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly.