Robert McKee Quotes

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
Robert McKee
In comedy laughter settles all arguments.
Robert McKee
Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.
Robert McKee
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.
Robert McKee
You do not keep the audience's interest by giving it information, but by withholding information ....
Robert McKee
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
Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
Robert McKee
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
When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
Robert McKee
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
Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
Robert McKee
Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
Robert McKee
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
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
Creativity is choice-making.
Robert McKee
The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.
Robert McKee
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
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
In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
Robert McKee
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
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
Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
Robert McKee
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
Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
Robert McKee
No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Robert McKee
All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
Robert McKee
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
If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.
Robert McKee
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
What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
Robert McKee