W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.

I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.

I'm trying to make the readers feel as if he or she is right there in the conversation, and so I don't try to manipulate it too much.

I never want to be the all-knowing god of the story, manipulating what's to happen or the action.

A thriller needs to hold the interest of the reader from the very beginning. It needs to engage with them, hold them in rapt attention, and prevent them from putting down the book.

I love to play with the notion of who the protagonist is - who is the audience supposed to root for? I did it in 'Sicario' and feel it was the strength of the script - guiding the audience's allegiance toward the villain because they think he's the hero, until it's revealed that he's the villain.

Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique -- 'What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?'

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Character is the plot in many ways

The more you ignore me, the closer I get; you're wasting your time.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.

Why didn't you guess this would happen?" Elayne demanded. He looked at her, expressionless. One side of his mouth twitched up, then he pulled his hat down, shading his eyepatch. "Light," Elayne said. "You knew. You spent this whole week planning with us, and you knew the entire time you'd throw it out with the dishwater.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

That'’s a way to increase the realism to the reader, if you want to get technical - you leave it [character] vague and you let the reader fill in the blanks with their imagination.

A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.