Robert McKee Quotes

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

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.

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.

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.

Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.

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.

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

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.

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

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

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

Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.

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

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.

Leaders use story to author the future.

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

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

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.

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.

Story is about originality, not duplication

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

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

Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.