M.H. McKee Quotes
All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
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.
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
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.
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.
When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
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.
In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality.
Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.
Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.
In comedy laughter settles all arguments.
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.
Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails.
There are different definitions of love, and one of the most wonderful definitions of love is to allow somebody to be.
When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.
Cheating is bad. That's a big mistake I've made, and I've really hurt people. I've never lied about it, though. I've always been honest.
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.
Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
In my head, I wanted to be Madonna, but the music I was writing on paper was not what you'd choreograph dancers in costumes to. It was more coffee-house stuff.
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.
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.
A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations... four or maybe five generations.
My mum certainly isn't a prude, nor is my brother, so I think I'm lucky to have a family like that.
The way football is being played currently, that I have seen, it's dangerous. It's dangerous and it could impact their long-term mental health. You only get one brain.
No matter what, I always have expensive designer shoes. It's all about the shoes for me.
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.
Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
