Story Quotes

“You might forget the day you saw a dead body in the street, but the death of Hamlet haunts you forever.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Show, don’t tell” means respect the intelligence and sensitivity of your audience.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The first draft of anything is shit. — ERNEST HEMINGWAY”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Story is metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Art consists of separating one tiny piece from the rest of the universe and holding it up in such a way that it appears to be the most important, fascinating thing of this moment.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“A revered Hollywood axiom warns: “Movies are about their last twenty minutes.” In other words, for a film to have a chance in the world, the last act and its climax must be the most satisfying experience of all. For no matter what the first ninety minutes have achieved, if the final movement fails, the film will die over its opening weekend.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“As Aristotle tells us: “For the purposes of [story] a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“You must shape your story in a way that both expresses your vision and satisfies the audience’s desires.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Second, once inside this alien world, we find ourselves. Deep within these characters and their conflicts we discover our own humanity.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“No one needs yet another recipe book on how to reheat Hollywood leftovers. We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent. No matter where a film is made—Hollywood, Paris, Hong Kong—if it’s of archetypal quality, it triggers a global and perpetual chain reaction of pleasure that carries it from cinema to cinema, generation to generation.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The audience wants to be taken to the limit, to where all questions are answered, all emotion satisfied—the end of the line.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Life teaches that the measure of the value of any human desire is in direct proportion to the risk involved in its pursuit. The higher the value, the higher the risk. We give the ultimate values to those things that demand the ultimate risks—our freedom, our lives, our souls.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: “But it actually happened.” Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“When two friends meet on the street and talk about the weather, don't we know that theirs isn't a conversation about the weather? What is being said? "I'm your friend. Let's take a minute out of our busy day and stand here in each other's presence and reaffirm that we are indeed friends." They might talk about sports, weather, shopping...anything. But the text is not the subtext. What is said and done is not what is thought and felt. The scene is not about what it seems to be about. Screen dialogue, therefore, must have the swing of everyday talk but content well above normal.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“A character is no more a human being than the Venus de Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they're superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we think we understand them, we don't.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The dramatist is fascinated by the inner life, the passions and sins, madness and dreams of the human heart. But not the comedy writer. He fixes on the social life - the idiocy, arrogance, and brutality in society. The comedy writer singles out a particular institution that he feels has become encrusted with hypocrisy and folly, then goes on the attack. Often we can spot the social institution under assault by noting the film's title.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives. No one and nothing coincidental will come along to take that responsibility from us, regardless of the injustices and chaos around us. You could be locked in a cell for the rest of your life for a crime you did not commit. But every morning you would still have to get up and make meaning. Do I bludgeon my brains against this wall or do I find some way to get through my days with value? Our lives are ultimately in our own hands. Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Story creates meaning. Coincidence, then, would seem our enemy, for it is the random, absurd collisions of things in the universe and is, by definition, meaningless. And yet coincidence is a part of life, often a powerful part, rocking existence, then vanishing as absurdly as it arrived. The solution, therefore, is not to avoid coincidence, but to dramatize how it may enter life meaninglessly, but in time gain meaning, how the anti-logic of randomness becomes the logic of life-as-lived.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“We must realize that a screenplay is not a novel. Novelists can directly invade the thoughts and feelings of characters. We cannot. Novelists, therefore, can indulge the luxury of free association. We cannot. The prose writer can, if he wishes, walk a character past a shop window, have him look inside and remember his entire childhood. Exposition in prose is relatively easy, but the camera is an X-ray machine for all things false. If we try to force exposition into a film through novel-like free associative editing or semi-subliminal flutter cuts that "glimpse" a character's thoughts, it strikes us as contrived.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Story Climax is the fourth of the five-part structure. This crowning Major Reversal is not necessarily full of noise and violence. Rather, it must be full of meaning. If I could send a telegram to the film producers of the world, it would be these three words: "Meaning Produces Emotion." Not money; not sex; not special effects; not movie stars; not lush photography.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence; that their existence operates through continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“All fine films, novels, and plays, through all shades of the comic and the tragic, entertain when they give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with an affective meaning.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life? But the answer eludes us, hiding behind a blur of racing hours as we struggle to fit our means to our dreams, fuse idea with passion, turn desire into reality. (...)
Traditionally humankind has sought the answer to Aristotle's question from the four wisdoms - philosophy, science, religion, art - taking insight from each to bolt together a livable meaning. But today who reads Hegel or Kant without an exam to pass? Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Who can listen without cynicism to economists, sociologists, politicians? Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in traditional ideologies diminishes, we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“No hay en este mundo suficiente de nada para todos. No hay suficientes alimentos, suficiente amor, suficiente justicia y nunca hay suficiente tiempo.”
― Robert McKee, El guion. Sustancia, estructura, estilo y principios de la escritura de guiones

“Stanislavski called this the “Magic if …,” the daydreamy hypothetical that floats through the mind, opening the door to the imagination where everything and anything seems possible.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“As we gather in all the scenes that satirize Hollywood aristocracy, we realize that commercial films that presume to instruct society on how to solve its shortcomings are certain to be false. For, with few exceptions, most filmmakers, like Sullivan, are not interested in the suffering poor as much as the picturesque poor.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting