Robert McKee Quotes

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

As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take.

We shape the telling to fit the substance, rework the substance to support the design.

How does anyone know from moment to moment what to say or do next until he senses the reaction to what he just did? He doesn't know. Life is always action/reaction. No monologues. No prepared speeches. An improvisation no matter how we mentally rehearse our big moment.

Love relationships are political. An old Gypsy expression goes: “He who confesses first loses.” The first person to say “I love you” has lost because the other, upon hearing it, immediately smiles a knowing smile, realizing that he’s the one loved, so he now controls the relationship.

But I know that 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.

...story is first, last, and always the experience of aesthetic emotion - the simultaneous encounter of thought and feeling.

"Crisis is the third of the five-part form. It means decision. Characters make spontaneous decisions each time they open their mouths to say "this" not "that." In each scene they make a decision to take one action rather than another. But Crisis with a capital C is the ultimate decision. The Chinese ideogram for Crisis is two terms: Danger/Opportunity - "danger" in that the wrong decision at this moment will lose forever what we want; "opportunity" in that the right choice will achieve our desire."

Pace begins in the screenplay. Cliche or not, we must control rhythm and tempo. It needn't be a symmetrical swelling of activity and shaving of scene lengths, but progressions must be shaped. For if we don't, the film editor will. And if to trim our sloppy work he cuts some of our favorite moments, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We're screenwriters, not refugees from the novel. Cinema is a unique art form. The screenwriter must master the aesthetics of motion pictures and create a screenplay that prepares the way for the artists who follow.

of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional.

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

درام زندگی بداهه پردازی بی پایانی است

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.

Hope, after all, is not unreasonable. It’s simply hypothetical.

...in truth there’s only one story. In essence we have told one another the same tale, one way or another, since the dawn of humanity, and that story could be usefully called the Quest. All stories take the form of a Quest.