Robert McKee Quotes

In storytelling, logic is retroactive.

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

storytelling is a ritual surrounding a metaphor for life.

The repetition of “serious” emotion is, in fact, a favorite comic device.

A beautifully told story is a symphonic unity in which structure, setting, character, genre, and idea meld seamlessly. To find their harmony, the writer must study the elements of story as if they were instruments of an orchestra — first separately, then in concert.

Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought. Self-expression is never an issue, for, wittingly or unwittingly, all stories, honest and dishonest, wise and foolish, faithfully mirror their maker, exposing his humanity … or lack of it.

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.

An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.

The dramatist is fascinated by the inner life, the passions and sins, madness and dreams of the human heart. But not the comedy writer. He fixes on the social life - the idiocy, arrogance, and brutality in society. The comedy writer singles out a particular institution that he feels has become encrusted with hypocrisy and folly, then goes on the attack. Often we can spot the social institution under assault by noting the film's title.

The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity.

A storyteller puts a friendly arm around the audience, saying: “Let me show you something.

Within the first pages of a screenplay a reader can judge the relative skill of the writer simply by noting how he handles exposition.

All fine films, novels, and plays, through all shades of the comic and the tragic, entertain when they give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with an affective meaning.

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.

we secretly enjoy rush hour; drive-time is the only time most of us are ever alone.