Robert McKee Quotes
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Leaders use story to author the future.
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Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
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There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.
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Never sleep with anybody who has more problems than you do.
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The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.
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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.
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Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.
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Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.
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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.
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The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.
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To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.
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Stories are the currency of human relationships.
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The universal erosion of values has lead to the universal erosion of story.
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Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.
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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.
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Life is chaotic and meaningless, and you have to find your meaning. You must find the answer, you can't just live. That's the point of story: helping you find your meaning in life.
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Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks fall away, faces become vulnerable, receptive. Filmgoers do not defend their emotions, rather they open to the storyteller in ways even their lovers never know, welcoming laughter, tears, terror, rage, compassion, passion, love, hate--the ritual often exhausts them.
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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.
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In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
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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.
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The students realize that it's their life I'm talking about: it's out of balance, they're struggling to put it into balance. How are they going to do it?
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Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.
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We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we're surprised by its relative ease. We're left to wonder why we dreaded it until we realize that most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
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Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
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The dirty secret of art is you don't have to show people your bad writing. That's what we have the delete key for.
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Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
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Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
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The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails.
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God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.
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When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.
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