Top 120 Robert McKee Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”

— Robert McKee

2. “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.”

— Robert McKee

3. “Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

Featured in: Discipline Quotes

5. “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.”

— Robert McKee

Featured in: Creative Quotes

6. “To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.”

— Robert McKee

7. “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.”

— Robert McKee

8. “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.”

— Robert McKee

Featured in: Helping Quotes

9. “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.”

— Robert McKee

10. “Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.”

— Robert McKee

11. “To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

Featured in: Artist Quotes

13. “When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you’ll have choices galore.”

— Robert McKee

14. “Don’t be didactic – don’t write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the ‘idea’ dynamically and without preaching.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

16. “Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.”

— Robert McKee

17. “Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.”

— Robert McKee

18. “Secure writers don’t sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.”

— Robert McKee

Featured in: Quotes About Actors

19. “We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery.”

— Robert McKee

20. “Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.”

— Robert McKee

21. “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.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

23. “Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.”

— Robert McKee

24. “Stories are the currency of human relationships.”

— Robert McKee

25. “A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

27. “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.”

— Robert McKee

28. “Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.”

— Robert McKee

29. “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.”

— Robert McKee

30. “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.”

— Robert McKee

31. “The mark of a master is to select only a few moments, but give us a lifetime.”

— Robert McKee

32. “Classical design is a mirror of the human mind. It’s how we see the world.”

— Robert McKee

33. “When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl. – T. S. ELIOT.”

— Robert McKee

34. “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.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

36. “The universal erosion of values has lead to the universal erosion of story.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

41. “The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.”

— Robert McKee

42. “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.”

— Robert McKee

43. “There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.”

— Robert McKee

44. “Leaders use story to author the future.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

46. “In comedy laughter settles all arguments.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

48. “The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: “But it actually happened.” Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.”

— Robert McKee

49. “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.”

— Robert McKee

50. “When a society cannot ridicule and criticize its institutions, it cannot laugh. The shortest book ever written would be the history of German humor, a culture that has suffered spells of paralyzing fear of authority. Comedy is at heart an angry, antisocial art. To solve the problem of weak comedy, therefore, the writer first asks: What am I angry about? He finds that aspect of society that heats his blood and goes on an assault.”

— Robert McKee