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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
Artists
Rules
Writers
Masters
Inexperienced
Break
Rebellious
Artist
Obey
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Anxious
Master

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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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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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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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What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
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Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.
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Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
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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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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 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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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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In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
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We rarely know where we are going writing is a discovery.
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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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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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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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Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.
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I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.
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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 currency of human relationships.
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Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.
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