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

Robert McKee

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Robert McKee
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: January 30
Author
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Choices
Versus
Audience
Badly
Given
Profound
Always
Material
Materials
Choice
Choose
Brilliantly
Told
Trivial

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Stories are the currency of human relationships.
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Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.
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Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.
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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.
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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.
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What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
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Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.
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In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
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No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
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To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.
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Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
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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.
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When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!
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To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.
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When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.
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I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.
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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.
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Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
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Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality.
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Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
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