Quotes from Robert McKee

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

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

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.

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

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

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

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

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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