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If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.Robert McKee
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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
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All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.Robert McKee
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No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.Robert McKee
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Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.Robert McKee
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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
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Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.Robert McKee
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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
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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
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In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.Robert McKee
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True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.Robert McKee
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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
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The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.Robert McKee
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Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.Robert McKee
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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
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Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.Robert McKee
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Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.Robert McKee
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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
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When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.Robert McKee
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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
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Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.Robert McKee
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Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game. These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict. What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, "The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go in to heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives. .Robert McKee
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You do not keep the audience's interest by giving it information, but by withholding information ....Robert McKee
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In comedy laughter settles all arguments.Robert McKee
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Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.Robert McKee