Robert McKee

“If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.”

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

“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.”

“Creativity is choice-making.”

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

“When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.”

“We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.”