Robert McKee Quotes

54 quotes in 820 categories

• 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…
• Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as…
• All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
• Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
• Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
• Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
• No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
• 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…
• Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
• The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.
• The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails.
• Story is morally neutral. It can express profound truth or propaganda. The two greatest political storytellers of the 20th Century were Winston Churchill and Adolph…
• Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
• 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…
• 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…
• Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.
• Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.
• The principle of Creative Limitations calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles and restricted boundaries. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push…
• To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.
• The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.

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