Quotes by Robert McKee

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

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 the story youre telling, is the story youre telling, youre in deep shit.

When talented people write badly, its generally for one of two reasons: Either theyre blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of theyre driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: Theyre moved by a desire to touch the audience.

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

No civilization, including Platos, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

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

Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, its the key to victory over fear and its cousin, depression.

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

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.

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.

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

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 characters essential nature.

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.

The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.

Creativity is choice-making.

Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

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.

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

Most of lifes actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.