Robert McKee Quotes

Never sleep with anybody who has more problems than you do.

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

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.

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.

Oh, by the way, I tend to use a lot of profanities. I do that for a reason: I like it.

Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.

The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.

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 the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.

The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails.

There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.

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.

Aristotle said time is a measure of change, and this movie is about changing in time, through time, while remaining the same person. That's a philosophical paradox and a moral dilemma. But 'Casablanca' says it's possible. You can have both. That's what it means. And that's my wish for you: that you would have both.

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.

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.

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?

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

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 asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.

Story is about originality, not duplication

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 aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.

I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.

The universal erosion of values has lead to the universal erosion of story.

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.

Classical design is a mirror of the human mind. It's how we see the world.

Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.

When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.

Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.

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.

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

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.

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

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.

The mark of a master is to select only a few moments, but give us a lifetime.

We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery.

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.

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 Hitler. Because storytelling is a form of persuasive jujitsu, and because world is full of black belt storytellers, the corporate leader has to train both his offensive and defensive moves

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.

Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks fall away, faces become vulnerable, receptive. Filmgoers do not defend their emotions, rather they open to the storyteller in ways even their lovers never know, welcoming laughter, tears, terror, rage, compassion, passion, love, hate--the ritual often exhausts them.