Robert McKee Quotes

"Language composed into dialogue offers a spectrum that runs from mental meanings at one end to sensual experiences at the other. For example, a character might call a singer's voice either "lousy" or "sour." Both terms make sense, but "lousy" is a dead metaphor that once meant "covered with lice." "Sour" still has life. The moment the audience hears "sour," their lips start to pucker. Which line stirs the most inner feeling: "She walks like a model" or "She moves like a slow, hot song"? Dialogue can express the same idea in countless ways, but in general, the more sensory the trope, the deeper and more memorable its effect."

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

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.

In storytelling, logic is retroactive.

Story is metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict.

In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But 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.

Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.

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.

Porque los artistas no deben tener sólo ideas que expresar, sino ideas que demostrar. Expresar una idea, en el sentido de presentarla, nunca es suficiente. El público no debe únicamente entender; debe creer.

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.

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

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.

The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure to take one action or another in the pursuit of his desire.

What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?

Story creates meaning. Coincidence, then, would seem our enemy, for it is the random, absurd collisions of things in the universe and is, by definition, meaningless. And yet coincidence is a part of life, often a powerful part, rocking existence, then vanishing as absurdly as it arrived. The solution, therefore, is not to avoid coincidence, but to dramatize how it may enter life meaninglessly, but in time gain meaning, how the anti-logic of randomness becomes the logic of life-as-lived.