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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
Rules
Writers
Masters
Inexperienced
Break
Rebellious
Artist
Obey
Form
Anxious
Master
Artists

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To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.
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We rarely know where we are going writing is a discovery.
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I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.
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Stories are the currency of human relationships.
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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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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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Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.
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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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To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.
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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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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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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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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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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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No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
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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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