Quote

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
Told
Trivial
Choices
Versus
Audience
Badly
Given
Profound
Always
Material
Materials
Choice
Choose
Brilliantly

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Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
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Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.
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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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Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.
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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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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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To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.
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To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.
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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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I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.
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Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
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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.
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We rarely know where we are going writing is a discovery.
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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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In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
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Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.
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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.
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What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
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There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.
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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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