Robert McKee Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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.

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

Story is about originality, not duplication

Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

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

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

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

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 story: helping you find your meaning in life.

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

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

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

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.

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.

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

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.

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, mature work seals its integrity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we're surprised by its relative ease. We're left to wonder why we dreaded it until we realize that most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.

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

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

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

Leaders use story to author the future.

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

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