163 Quotes About Plot

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It’s what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you’ve lost the plot. Or just lost it.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Plot is the artificial reduction of life’s complexity and randomness. It is a way to give aesthetic form to reality.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.

People are always asking that about books: What’s it about? It sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. You could take all day to answer it if you really wanted to. And if the person asking the question really wanted to hear it.

Plot as such is not a major ingredient in my novels... it's often better to sail on the unconscious sea.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.