Top 120 Robert McKee Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Oh, by the way, I tend to use a lot of profanities. I do that for a reason: I like it.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

53. “Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable.”

— Robert McKee

54. “In storytelling, logic is retroactive.”

— Robert McKee

55. “Show, don’t tell” means respect the intelligence and sensitivity of your audience.”

— Robert McKee

56. “The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn’t, the story fails.”

— Robert McKee

57. “Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.”

— Robert McKee

58. “No hay en este mundo suficiente de nada para todos. No hay suficientes alimentos, suficiente amor, suficiente justicia y nunca hay suficiente tiempo.”

— Robert McKee

59. “You may think you know, but you don’t know you know until you can write it down. Research is not daydreaming. Explore your past, relive it, then write it down. In your head it’s only memory, but written down it becomes working knowledge. Now with the bile of fear in your belly, write an honest, one-of-a-kind scene.”

— Robert McKee

60. “An image system is a strategy of motifs, a category of imagery embedded in the film that repeats in sight and sound from beginning to end with persistence and great variation, but with equally great subtlety, as a subliminal communication to increase the depth and complexity of aesthetic emotion.”

— Robert McKee

61. “The difference is this: You’re lonely when you have something to share but no one to share it with. You’re lost when you have nothing to share, no matter with whom you live. Of course, you can be both lonely and lost, but of the two, lost inflicts the greater pain.”

— Robert McKee

62. “Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. Write only what you believe.”

— Robert McKee

63. “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.”

— Robert McKee

64. “As we gather in all the scenes that satirize Hollywood aristocracy, we realize that commercial films that presume to instruct society on how to solve its shortcomings are certain to be false. For, with few exceptions, most filmmakers, like Sullivan, are not interested in the suffering poor as much as the picturesque poor.”

— Robert McKee

65. “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.”

— Robert McKee

66. “Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.”

— Robert McKee

67. “An archetypal story creates settings and characters so rare that our eyes feast on every detail, while its telling illuminates conflicts so true to humankind that it journeys from culture to culture.”

— Robert McKee

68. “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?”

— Robert McKee

69. “Second, once inside this alien world, we find ourselves. Deep within these characters and their conflicts we discover our own humanity.”

— Robert McKee

70. “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.”

— Robert McKee

71. “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 or they’re driven by an emotion they must express.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

73. “I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can’t be.”

— Robert McKee

74. “You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information...”

— Robert McKee

75. “Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.”

— Robert McKee

76. “We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure.”

— Robert McKee

77. “Who are these characters? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they go about getting it? What stops them? What are the consequences? Finding the answers to these grand questions and shaping them into story is our overwhelming creative task.”

— Robert McKee

78. “Creativity isn’t learning the right answers but asking the strongest questions.”

— Robert McKee

79. “The art of story is not about the middle ground, but about the pendulum of existence swinging to the limits, about life lived in its most intense states. We explore the middle ranges of experience, but only as a path to the end of the line. The audience senses that limit and wants it reached. For no matter how.”

— Robert McKee

80. “You might forget the day you saw a dead body in the street, but the death of Hamlet haunts you forever.”

— Robert McKee

81. “Life is absurd. But there is one meaningful thing, one inarguable thing, and that is that there is suffering. Fine writing helps alleviate that suffering – and anything that puts meaning and beauty into the world in the form of story, helps people to live with more peace and purpose and balance, is deeply worthwhile.”

— Robert McKee

82. “Values are the soul of storytelling.”

— Robert McKee

83. “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. To build a scene, we constantly break open these breaches in reality.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

85. “Story creates meaning. Coincidence, then, would seem our enemy, for it is the random, absurd collisions of things in the universe and is, by definition, meaningless. And yet coincidence is a part of life, often a powerful part, rocking existence, then vanishing as absurdly as it arrived. The solution, therefore, is not to avoid coincidence, but to dramatize how it may enter life meaninglessly, but in time gain meaning, how the anti-logic of randomness becomes the logic of life-as-lived.”

— Robert McKee

86. “For those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desire are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite.”

— Robert McKee

87. “The audience wants to be taken to the limit, to where all questions are answered, all emotion satisfied – the end of the line.”

— Robert McKee

88. “Generally, great writers are not eclectic. Each tightly focuses his oeuvre on one idea, a single subject that ignites his passion, a subject he pursues with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work.”

— Robert McKee

89. “Creativity is choice-making.”

— Robert McKee

90. “Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small “t.” Big “T” Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.”

— Robert McKee

91. “As he chooses, he is.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

93. “Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it.”

— Robert McKee

94. “We shape the telling to fit the substance, rework the substance to support the design.”

— Robert McKee

95. “Boy-meets-girl has always been an irreducible convention that occurs early in the telling, to be followed by the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of love.”

— Robert McKee

96. “We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief.”

— Robert McKee

97. “You must shape your story in a way that both expresses your vision and satisfies the audience’s desires.”

— Robert McKee

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

— Robert McKee

99. “Eavesdrop on any coffee shop conversation and you’ll realize in a heartbeat you’d never put that slush onscreen. Real conversation is full of awkward pauses, poor word choices and phrasing, non sequiturs, pointless repetitions; it seldom makes a point or achieves closure. But that’s okay because conversation isn’t about making points or achieving closure. It’s what psychologists call “keeping the channel open.” Talk is how we develop and change relationships.”

— Robert McKee

100. “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.”

— Robert McKee