Top 79 Robert McKee Quotes
#1. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.
Robert McKee
#2. Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small "t." Big "T" Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.
Robert McKee
#3. Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it.
Robert McKee
#4. Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.
Robert McKee
#5. Story is about originality, not duplication
Robert McKee
#6. The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails.
Robert McKee
#7. The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure to take one action or another in the pursuit of his desire.
Robert McKee
#8. When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!
Robert McKee
#9. A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.
Robert McKee
#10. No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Robert McKee
#11. Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.
Robert McKee
#12. Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
Robert McKee
#13. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. Write only what you believe.
Robert McKee
#14. ( ... )while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that the unlived life isn't worth examining.
Robert McKee
#15. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
Robert McKee
#16. If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.
Robert McKee
#17. I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.
Robert McKee
#18. Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
Robert McKee
#19. Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.
Robert McKee
#21. Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable.
Robert McKee
#23. Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
Robert McKee
#24. Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.
Robert McKee
#25. All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
Robert McKee
#26. Never sleep with anybody who has more problems than you do.
Robert McKee
#27. How does anyone know from moment to moment what to say or do next until he senses the reaction to what he just did? He doesn't know. Life is always action/reaction. No monologues. No prepared speeches. An improvisation no matter how we mentally rehearse our big moment.
Robert McKee
#28. Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.
Robert McKee
#29. When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
Robert McKee
#30. The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.
Robert McKee
#31. An image system is a strategy of motifs, a category of imagery embedded in the film that repeats in sight and sound from beginning to end with persistence and great variation, but with equally great subtlety, as a subliminal communication to increase the depth and complexity of aesthetic emotion.
Robert McKee
#32. Every host in Hollywood has made that mistake: "Let's invite some comedy writers to the party! That'll brighten things up." Sure ... till the paramedics arrive.
Robert McKee
#33. God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.
Robert McKee
#35. Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.
Robert McKee
#36. All fine films, novels, and plays, through all shades of the comic and the tragic, entertain when they give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with an affective meaning.
Robert McKee
#37. When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.
Robert McKee
#38. Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
Robert McKee
#39. A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.
Robert McKee
#40. When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.
Robert McKee
#41. Stories are the currency of human relationships.
Robert McKee
#42. Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives ... Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.
Robert McKee
#43. Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
Robert McKee
#44. The students realize that it's their life I'm talking about: it's out of balance, they're struggling to put it into balance. How are they going to do it?
Robert McKee
#45. If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.
Robert McKee
#46. The dirty secret of art is you don't have to show people your bad writing. That's what we have the delete key for.
Robert McKee
#47. To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.
Robert McKee
#48. There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.
Robert McKee
#49. The mark of a master is to select only a few moments, but give us a lifetime.
Robert McKee
#50. The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.
Robert McKee
#51. Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.
Robert McKee
#52. True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.
Robert McKee
#53. Classical design is a mirror of the human mind. It's how we see the world.
Robert McKee
#54. Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.
Robert McKee
#55. Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task ... But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.
Robert McKee
#56. Life is chaotic and meaningless, and you have to find your meaning. You must find the answer, you can't just live. That's the point of story: helping you find your meaning in life.
Robert McKee
#57. You do not keep the audience's interest by giving it information, but by withholding information ...
Robert McKee
#58. To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.
Robert McKee
#59. Don't be didactic - don't write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the 'idea' dynamically and without preaching.
Robert McKee
#60. Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.
Robert McKee
#61. Boy-meets-girl has always been an irreducible convention that occurs early in the telling, to be followed by the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of love.
Robert McKee
#62. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
Robert McKee
#65. No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.
Robert McKee
#66. of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional.
Robert McKee
#67. Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
Robert McKee
#69. Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality,
Robert McKee
#70. The universal erosion of values has lead to the universal erosion of story.
Robert McKee
#71. It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.
Robert McKee
#72. Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
Robert McKee
#73. In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
Robert McKee
#74. In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.
Robert McKee
#75. Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.
Robert McKee
#76. We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery.
Robert McKee
#77. Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.
Robert McKee
#78. Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.
Robert McKee
#79. Oh, by the way, I tend to use a lot of profanities. I do that for a reason: I like it.
Robert McKee
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