Books Quote by Virginia Woolf

For each book, there's a back story of where the idea came from. Sometimes it's derived from a current event or topic of discussion.…

— Sandra Brown

Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.

— Patrick deWitt

I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do.

— Michael Korda

There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up.

— Raymond E. Feist

Plots are ... what the writer sees with.

— Eudora Welty

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

— Hilary Mantel

It had come about exactly in the way things happened in books.

— Agatha Christie

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

— Scott Spencer

There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.

— Jonathan Carroll

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.

— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

— Will Hobbs

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

— David Shields