Robert McKee famous quotes

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.
-- Robert McKee

#Leadership #Powerful #Ideas

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
-- Robert McKee

#Writing #Discipline #Drill Sergeant

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

#Meaningful #Powerful #Creative

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

#Meaningful #Emotional #Museums

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 driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience.
-- Robert McKee

#Writing #Ideas #Two

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

#Mirrors #Design #Mind

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
-- Robert McKee

#Thinking #Facts #Truth Is

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

#Giving #Moments #Lifetime

Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality,
-- Robert McKee

#Reality #Stories #Flight

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

#Cousin #War #Winning

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

#Creativity #Writing #Heart

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

#Art #Liars #Lying

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.
-- Robert McKee

#Hero #Writing #Skills

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

#Art #Silence #Mind

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

#Writing #Play #Imagination

Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
-- Robert McKee

#Slow Motion #Influence #Persuasion

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.
-- Robert McKee

#Philosophical #Mean #Wish

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
-- Robert McKee

#Moving #Two #Profound

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

#Stories #Action #Failing

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

#Sex #Law #Return

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

#Stories #Answers #Helping

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

#Way #Use #Reason

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

#Sleep #Advice #Problem

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

#Character

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

#Lists #Stories #Bullets

Stories are the currency of human relationships.
-- Robert McKee

#Stories #Currency #Humans

Story is about originality, not duplication
-- Robert McKee

#Stories #Originality

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

#Artist #Rebellious #Break

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

#Powerful #Drama #Light

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

#Plato #Civilization #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.
-- Robert McKee

#Communication #Thinking #Talking

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

#Integrity #Actors #Scripts

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

#Soul #Matter #Midnight

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

#Lonely #Character #Mean

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

#Decision #Willpower #Action

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

#Math #Two #Logic

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

#Lying #Meaning Of Life #Emotion

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.
-- Robert McKee

#Laughter #Comedy #Argument

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

#Boredom #Suffering #Desire

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

#Writing #Discovery

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

#Names #Giving

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
-- Robert McKee

#Stories #Life Is #Metaphor

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

#Profound #Choices #Given

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.
-- Robert McKee

#Art #Reality #Giving

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

#Creativity #Differences #Achievement

The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.
-- Robert McKee

#Stories #Talent #Materials

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

#Struggle #Talking #Balance

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

#Character #Writing #Voice

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.
-- Robert McKee

#Writing #Marathon #Sprint

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

#Writing #Rough Times #Reason

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

#Crafts #Fuel #Talent

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 against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put obstacles in our path - barriers that will inspire us. We disciple ourselves as to what to do, while we're boundless as to how to do it.
-- Robert McKee

#Creativity #Circles #Creative

To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.
-- Robert McKee

#People #Stories #Levels

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.
-- Robert McKee

#Laughter #Hate #Fall

Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer's labor goes into designing the story designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart.  Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought.
-- Robert McKee

#Powerful #Heart #Maturity