Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

— Robert McKee

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

— Robert McKee

The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.

— Robert McKee

True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.

— Robert McKee

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication, and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

— Robert McKee

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

— Robert McKee

When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience.

— Robert McKee

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

— Robert McKee

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion... Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.

— Robert McKee

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.

— Robert McKee