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

Robert McKee

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Robert McKee
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: January 30
Author
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Writers
Masters
Inexperienced
Break
Rebellious
Artist
Obey
Form
Anxious
Master
Artists
Rules

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There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.
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No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
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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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Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.
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We rarely know where we are going writing is a discovery.
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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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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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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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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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Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
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Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
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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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Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.
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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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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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To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.
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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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