Plot Twist Quotes

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting.

The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.

Basic Instinct 2' is an uneasy experience because, although it is hyper-reflexive to the point where it is hard to think of one character, one scene, one plot twist that isn't a reference or an echo, there is nothing knowing about it. No matter how absurd the film gets, it refuses to raise its eyebrows.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

A film that I love is 'Deliverance' from back in the day. You start out with these archetypal characters - the hero, the bookworm, the pacifist - and by the end, it's all turned upside down. I love that.

This element of surprise or mystery — the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called — is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.

I remember reading 'The Guest' and thinking, 'This is going to be something!'

I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on... and The Princess Diaries was born!

There's a lot of similarities, I think, between a thriller and a comedy because it's all about tension. It's about building tension and setups and payoffs and misdirections and surprising people and sort of pushing the boundary.

When you're watching a Hitchcock movie, you, for most of the movie, are playing the guessing game. What's the endgame? What's the plot? How are these people involved? It's the best way to tell the story, and as a viewer, that's what you want to experience.

Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the "Secret Annexe." The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.

I have a bad habit, in the shows that I run, of killing off the people that I love.

I've always really liked murder mysteries and thrillers, and great to be able to be actually part of one.

The thing with '24' is that because it moves so much, it's a challenge, and sometimes things get revealed about these characters as you go.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

Drama is about conflict, and it's about putting obstacles in the path of people you who care about.

The thought of a man being the murderer of his own daughter in the Twin Peaks was anathema to me. At the time, I had a 2-year-old daughter of my own, and that possibility really turned me off. I was praying that I wouldn't be the one.

There's always another secret.' -Kelsier

After The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, the audience would like to know where, when, and who arrests Hannibal Lecter for the first time. This is the story of Red Dragon.

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