Robert McKee Quotes

54 quotes in 820 categories

• Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
• In comedy laughter settles all arguments.
• To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.
• 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,…
• 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…
• Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what…
• A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to…
• In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
• 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…
• 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.
• Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
• When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
• Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
• When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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,…
• What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
• We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic…
• We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery.

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