The Plot Quotes

“Good writers borrow, great writers steal. —T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Once you were in possession of an actual idea, you owed it a debt for having chosen you, and not some other writer, and you paid that debt by getting down to work, not just as a journeyman fabricator of sentences but as an unshrinking artist ready to make painful, time-consuming, even self-flagellating mistakes.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Cause I’m telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“You’re only as successful as the last book you published, and you’re only as good as the next book you’re writing. So shut up and write.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“People don’t realize you can’t copyright a plot,” Alessandro said finally. “You can’t even copyright a title, and that would be a lot easier to make an argument about.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“...I've always thought there was a kind of beauty to it, the way narratives get told and retold. It's how stories survive through the ages. You can follow an idea from one author's work to another, and to me that's something I find powerful and exciting.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Either it’s a good plot or it isn’t. And if it’s not a good plot, the best writing isn’t going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn’t going to hurt it.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“But there was one thing he actually did believe in that bordered on the magical, or at least the beyond-pedestrian, and that was the duty a writer owed to a story.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“But there was an unfortunate complication, namely that her mother and father were Christians, and not the Jesus-is-love kind of Christians but the Hell-has-a-special-room-waiting-for-you kind.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Midway upon the journey of our life, he heard himself think, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“She had learned not to expect love, and wasn’t even sure she wanted it. This was the most profound wisdom she’d managed to glean from the fifteen years she had spent in her mother’s presence. Fifteen down. One—please,”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Anyone could be an idiot or a jerk, separately, but the combination of ignorance and meanspiritedness--that was special.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“I’ve learned so much about writers. You’re a strange kind of beast, aren’t you, with your petty feuds and your fifty shades of narcissism? You act like words don’t belong to everyone. You act like stories don’t have real people attached to them. It’s hurtful, Jake.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“It was all he could do not to laugh, the lives of the vast majority of authors being far more private than they likely wished. Maybe Stephen King or John Grisham got approached in the supermarket by a quavering person extending pen and paper, but for most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“(Jake had nothing of value to teach aspiring poets. In his experience, poets often read fiction, but fiction writers who said they read poetry with any regularity were liars)”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“which he’d spent in a hotel in Milwaukee, eating a terrible burger”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Stories, of course, are common as dirt. Everyone has one, if not an infinity of them, and they surround us at all times whether we acknowledge them or not. Stories are the wells we dip into to be reminded of who we are, and the ways we reassure ourselves that, however obscure we may appear to others, we are actually important, even crucial, to the ongoing drama of survival: personal, societal, and even as a species.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Entweder man hat einen guten Plot oder nicht. Wenn´s kein guter Plot ist, dann hilft auch die beste Schreibe nichts. Und wenn´s ein guter Plot ist, dann macht ihn auch die mieseste Schreibe nicht kaputt.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“but they broke down along another divide: those determined to make high school the best time of their lives and those who expected to move on to far more interesting experiences.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Writers wanting him to confirm their theories about discrimination in the publishing world—Anti-Semitism! Sexism! Racism! Ageism!—as the sole and true reason their 800-page experimental non-linear punctuation-free neo-novel had been turned down by every publisher in the country.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“In his experience, poets often read fiction, but fiction writers who said they read poetry with any regularity were liars), so it could”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Він завжди лише хотів розповідати - найкращими словами, розставленими в найкращому порядку, - історії, які жили в ньому.”
― Джин Ганфф Кореліц, The Plot

“I don’t think I was young even when I actually was young, and that wasn’t yesterday.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Nobody else gets to live your life.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“The Communications Decency Act of 1996 says they can’t be held liable for defamation made by third parties. They’re considered a vector for other people’s free speech, technically, so they’re in the clear.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“She was pregnant. She was pregnant. That complete fuck.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Then he would be relegated to the circle of shamed writers forever and without hope of appeal: James Frey, Stephen Glass, Clifford Irving, Greg Mortenson, Jerzy Kosinski …”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

“Miss Saigon from Madam Butterfly. The Hours from Mrs. Dalloway. The Lion King from Hamlet,”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot