Top 100 Mckee Quotes
#1. The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.
Brian K. Vaughan
#2. The daydreamy hypothetical that floats through the mind, opening the door to the imagination where everything and anything is possible.
- Story, Robert McKee
Audrey Godwin
#3. I declare to goodness, I don't know but sometimes I believe in women's rights. If women were voting and making laws, I believe they'd have better sense. (Mrs. McKee to Laura, regarding homesteading laws)
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I think I'm very open and friendly and warm.
Gina McKee
#7. Being an actor somehow can be a perverse extension of that feeling we generally all have as children, that feeling of wanting to please. Of course you're looking for affirmation, encouragement.
Gina McKee
#8. Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it.
Robert McKee
#9. There are some artists that don't like working with other females, which is fine. They have their own thing. I personally love being surrounded by other females.
Bonnie McKee
#10. Sometimes you just gotta suck at being the person people think you are.
Ellie Rose McKee
#11. Creatures stalking each other over time grew a bond from mind to mind.
Suzy McKee Charnas
#12. In real life I'm pretty easy going and pretty chill, I'm not the party girl who will go wild and crazy necessarily.
Bonnie McKee
#13. I can be nostalgic for the past, and I can romanticize the future, but I cannot sugar coat the here and now. I think that's why I try not to think about it, and I think that's the exact same reason why I need to.
Ellie Rose McKee
#14. Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.
Robert McKee
#15. I was writing songs as a kid about leprechauns and Catwoman and teapots - whatever it is that little girls wanna sing about. The first song I wrote was called "Kitten." It was about a boy named Liam, who I was just crazy about.
Bonnie McKee
#16. Obviously I love writing with Katy [Pery], I feel like we're the same person when we write together. Even though we fight a lot, we fight over every line and we pull each other's hair and we cat-fight all the time, it's always worth it in the end.
Bonnie McKee
#17. Story is about originality, not duplication
Robert McKee
#18. The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails.
Robert McKee
#19. 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
#20. Sometimes I write a song and I'm down with it but I'm like yeah, whatever, and then everybody loves it and then it blows up. I'm like: "Okay! I didn't see that coming."
Bonnie McKee
#21. I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.
Bonnie McKee
#22. Wisdom is knowing the right path to take. Integrity is taking it.
M.H. McKee
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The first time I came to London on my own, I was 15. I was absolutely oblivious to so many things. I had no expectations, no fears. I just came to do a National Youth Theatre season one summer. It was just brilliant.
Gina McKee
#26. I don't believe there is one most romantic act that a guy can do; I think it is all about the couple in question, which totally differs. It's about you thinking about the person you are with and doing something tailored and thoughtful for them.
Roxanne McKee
#27. It's just funny that anybody would care at all to take apart the words that I write. It's kind of cool!
Bonnie McKee
#28. I started writing songs when I was a little kid actually. I wrote a song about Catwoman and I wrote a song about Leprechauns, as a little kid.
Bonnie McKee
#29. I criticise myself an awful lot. I do worry to the point that I don't think it's very healthy. I'm always picking my flaws. It's a terrible anxiety I have. I wish I could pretend nothing fazes me, but it does.
Roxanne McKee
#30. Where I grew up in the North-east, the community there, and the way people relate to one another, goes very deep. But I don't define myself as a Northerner in that I don't live in the North.
Gina McKee
#31. There's a way of negotiating how you portray your private life publicly that I've never had the skill to do.
Gina McKee
#32. No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Robert McKee
#33. 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
#34. I think it's nice to be able to make a product, put it out there and let other people decide what they think.
Gina McKee
#35. Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
Robert McKee
#36. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. Write only what you believe.
Robert McKee
#37. ( ... )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
#38. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
Robert McKee
#39. The ornaments of your home are the people who smile upon entering time and time again.
Maralee McKee
#40. The National Youth Theatre did one very simple but incredible thing for me: it made me realise I had choices.
Gina McKee
#41. When I go and write with other artists - a lot of the time it's with them - it's like a therapy session almost. I ask them what they're listening to and what they're going through and what their influences are and I try to get inside of their head and step into their shoes for a second.
Bonnie McKee
#42. No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. (1 Corinthians 10:13 NIV)
Jonathan McKee
#43. 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
#44. My instinct is probably one of the strongest assets I've got, workwise.
Gina McKee
#46. As long as I can reach somebody, then I feel like I'm doing my job.
Bonnie McKee
#47. I had an epiphany where I realised that there are song titles everywhere - in advertising, in conversations with people at the grocery store - and every time I open my mind to that and find titles, I then weave a story around that.
Bonnie McKee
#48. I'd like to go the Cher route and act and sing and write and have a TV show and do it all.
Bonnie McKee
#49. Every time I work with Dr. Luke I learn something new. He's kind of like the Andy Warhol of pop music, where he mass produces his art but it always still has heart and always still has an emotional thread to it. I think he's really a genius and I'm so lucky to have gotten to work with him.
Bonnie McKee
#50. I've always felt my spirit animal was a Tiger, so it's funny that now in 'Roar' with Katy Perry - which is a song we write together - there's the line: "I got the eye of the Tiger ... " So I feel like there's a little bit of me in there.
Bonnie McKee
#51. I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.
Robert McKee
#52. Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
Robert McKee
#53. No matter what, I always have expensive designer shoes. It's all about the shoes for me.
Bonnie McKee
#54. Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.
Robert McKee
#56. Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable.
Robert McKee
#57. When I hear about injustice it takes every fiber of my being and strength to stop from exploding. What I don't understand is why everyone else doesn't feel the same.
Ellie Rose McKee
#58. It's amazing how, over the course of one's life, you collect so much music you don't like, so many movies you don't watch and so many books you have no intention of reading. If only regret stopped with the trivial things such as these.
Ellie Rose McKee
#59. I think what it means to be an 'American Girl,' and what I wrote the song about, is our freedoms. The idea that we as Americans can be what we want to be and say what we want to say and that we take it for granted.
Bonnie McKee
#61. Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her dear dog a bone.
Though the cupboard was bare,
When she focused elsewhere
Her heart overflowed with fun!
Kristen McKee
#62. A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations ... four or maybe five generations.
Gina McKee
#63. Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
Robert McKee
#64. 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
#65. There are different definitions of love, and one of the most wonderful definitions of love is to allow somebody to be.
Gina McKee
#66. I think I've learnt a lot about bullying and how to deal with bullying and how to get over that and to just be yourself and forget the haters.
Bonnie McKee
#67. All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
Robert McKee
#68. Never sleep with anybody who has more problems than you do.
Robert McKee
#69. 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
#70. Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.
Robert McKee
#71. When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
Robert McKee
#72. I was one of those kids who found it difficult to eat anything that looked like an animal.
Gina McKee
#73. The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.
Robert McKee
#74. I love writing with Adam Lambert. He's really funny and very fun, he's a great friend.
Bonnie McKee
#75. I think the difference between a good song and a great song is ... honestly, I think the lyrics, because if you have a really solid melody and solid track and everything is there but then the lyric is just okay, then you've got a good song.
Bonnie McKee
#76. 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
#77. Usually I can go for three or four weeks and then I start to bake cakes or make jewellery and I think, 'hang on a minute, I'm obviously bored rigid. I need to get back out there.'
Gina McKee
#78. 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
#79. Today our children are our reflection. Tomorrow they will be our shadows.
Maralee McKee
#80. I like to go to the movies at The Hollywood Forever Cemetery. They do this thing in The Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood where everybody sits out on the grass and they project movies and it's very romantic and very old-school Hollywood, so I love that.
Bonnie McKee
#81. I love that, even after jumping through hoops forever, I can still get that buzz, that hook. That's very healthy, but it's bittersweet, too, because if you don't get the part, you have to deal with the disappointment. I don't think I'll ever negotiate those peaks and troughs wholly healthily.
Gina McKee
#82. 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
#84. I don't feel comfortable talking about my private life, and some people in my private life don't feel comfortable about me talking about it. So I don't.
Gina McKee
#85. I have a reoccurring dream that I'm in the ocean in New Zealand and everything is completely upside down, because it's on the other side of the planet.
Bonnie McKee
#86. 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
#87. If you can take it to the next level and really tell an interesting story in a unique and fresh way, then I feel like that's a great song.
Bonnie McKee
#88. 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
#89. When I moved to Seattle in fourth grade, I joined the Seattle Girls' Choir. It's a world-class choir, and we competed, toured Europe, and went and sang at the Vatican, so it was a really awesome experience to have that young.
Bonnie McKee
#90. When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.
Robert McKee
#91. Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
Robert McKee
#92. 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
#93. When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.
Robert McKee
#94. I love really kitschy bad movies. Showgirls is one of my favorites. I saw House of Versace and died. I'm a big fan of made-for-TV movies because those are instant classics, naturally.
Bonnie McKee
#95. Y'know, it's not that we need equality. Because everyone's already equal, it's just that a ton of idiots lost the memo. Indeed, everyone just needs to be TREATED like the equal they already are.
Ellie Rose McKee
#96. Stories are the currency of human relationships.
Robert McKee
#97. The way football is being played currently, that I have seen, it's dangerous. It's dangerous and it could impact their long-term mental health. You only get one brain.
Ann McKee
#98. 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
#99. Not all fiction writers are evil, just the ones good at their job. After all, it's not a decent book if it can't make you cry.
Ellie Rose McKee
#100. Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
Robert McKee
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