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.

— Robert McKee

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

— Robert McKee

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

— Robert McKee

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

— Robert McKee

Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

— Robert McKee

No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

— Robert McKee

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.

— Robert McKee

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game. These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the Pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict. What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart, or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, "The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go into heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives.

— Robert McKee

Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.

— Robert McKee

Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.

— Robert McKee