Robert McKee Quotes - Page 3

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.

Never sleep with anybody who has more problems than you do.

Story is about originality, not duplication

Story is morally neutral. It can express profound truth or propaganda. The two greatest political storytellers of the 20th Century were Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler. Because storytelling is a form of persuasive jujitsu, and because world is full of black belt storytellers, the corporate leader has to train both his offensive and defensive moves

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.

Oh, by the way, I tend to use a lot of profanities. I do that for a reason: I like it.

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

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

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.

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 comedy laughter settles all arguments.

Aristotle said time is a measure of change, and this movie is about changing in time, through time, while remaining the same person. That's a philosophical paradox and a moral dilemma. But 'Casablanca' says it's possible. You can have both. That's what it means. And that's my wish for you: that you would have both.

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

Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.

I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.

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?

It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.