Subplots Quotes & Sayings

Real problem is not population explosion, but what the population is doing. — Radhanath Swami

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. — Malcolm Gladwell

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scott-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. — W.B.Yeats

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. — Richard Flanagan

I felt a bit like Dante, chancing upon one of his old acquaintances in the nth circle of hell. — Paul Murray

It is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars. — William J. Clinton

All well and good, but for our purposes these otherwise-valuable insights are mere subplots almost designed to carry us down side trails while blithely humming a tune about the rough equivalence of forests and trees. — Joseph J. Ellis

If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a suporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder. — Dean Koontz

Your perspectives change your realities. — Bryant McGill

The best fortress which a prince can possess is the affection of his people. — Niccolo Machiavelli

A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the althernative scenerios explored in a detective novel. — Rebecca Solnit

My friend Isabel says, When you're writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness.
Of course. — Sarah Manguso

The midget, Bush, and that Rumsfeld deserve only to be beaten with shoes by freedom loving people everywhere. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth. — Bob Graham

Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death. — Jane Smiley

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

People don't come to Marvel movies for personal life subplots, no. — Anthony Mackie

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

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

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible. — Nicole Mones

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

YA heroines can have romances that are subplots: can have goals other than getting/keeping a man: can put their lovers second. JUST LIKE YAheroes DO! — Celine Kiernan

You're able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply can't in a movie. A movie really has to choose its battles. — Walter Kirn

Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained. — Grant Morrison

John (Grisham) was really helpful keeping me on track, not wandering off into subplots, making sure I didn't spill the beans too early, all kinds of nitty-gritty things that you've gotta have under control if you're going to write a good thriller. — Tony Vanderwarker

But before we get up close to the trees, we should step back and make sure we are gazing upon the same forest. As is so often the case with controversial matters, we will never agree on the smaller subplots if it turns out we aren't even telling the same story. The Bible says something about homosexuality. I hope everyone can agree on at least that much. And I hope everyone can agree that the Bible is manifestly not a book about homosexuality. — Kevin DeYoung

Our planet has a peculiar wobble - its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. — Howard Bloom

People enter states of consciousness where they think they've become enlightened. The best thing to do, if you've gone through one of those phases, is to be sensible, laugh at yourself for how foolish you were. — Frederick Lenz

Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast. — Oscar Wilde