Story Quotes

“First, the discovery of a world we do not know.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression. A stereotypical story reverses this pattern:”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The PROTAGONIST has a conscious desire.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The art of story is not about the middle ground, but about the pendulum of existence swinging to the limits, about life lived in its most intense states. We explore the middle ranges of experience, but only as a path to the end of the line. The audience senses that limit and wants it reached. For no matter how”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the characters and their world, a circumference of experience that’s defined by the nature of the fictional reality. This line may reach inward to the soul, outward into the universe, or in both directions at once. The audience, therefore, expects the storyteller to be an artist of vision who can take his story to those distant depths and ranges.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Story is metaphor for life.”
― Robert McKee, Story

“Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly. Master storytellers know how to squeeze life out of the least of things, while poor storytellers reduce the profound to the banal.”
― Robert McKee, Story

“They think life is A, B, C, D, E. That’s just when life likes to turn you around, kick you in the butt, and grin: “Not today, my friend. Today it’s E, D, C, B, A. Sorry.” PRINCIPLE”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“For while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also the case that the unlived life isn't worth examining.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“An image system is a strategy of motifs, a category of imagery embedded in the film that repeats in sight and sound from beginning to end with persistence and great variation, but with equally great subtlety, as a subliminal communication to increase the depth and complexity of aesthetic emotion.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet. He cannot use metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, synecdoche and metonymy, hyperbole and meiosis, the grand tropes. Instead, his work must contain all the substance of literature but not be literary. A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera. If not literature, what then is the screenwriter's ambition? To describe in such a way that as a reader turns pages, a film flows through the imagination.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“How does anyone know from moment to moment what to say or do next until he senses the reaction to what he just did? He doesn't know. Life is always action/reaction. No monologues. No prepared speeches. An improvisation no matter how we mentally rehearse our big moment.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“We often see films with a cast of excellent characters...except one, who's dreadful. We wonder why until we realize that the writer hates this character. He's trivializing and insulting this role at every opportunity. And I'll never understand this. How can a writer hate his own character? It's his baby. How can he hate what he gave life? Embrace all your creations, especially the bad people. They deserve love like everyone else.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The audience knows that people rarely, if ever, understand themselves, and if they do, they're incapable of complete and honest self-explanation. There's always a subtext. If, by chance, what a character says about himself is actually true, we don't know it's true until we witness his choices made under pressure. Self-explanation must be validated or contradicted in action.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“When a society cannot ridicule and criticize its institutions, it cannot laugh. The shortest book ever written would be the history of German humor, a culture that has suffered spells of paralyzing fear of authority. Comedy is at heart an angry, antisocial art. To solve the problem of weak comedy, therefore, the writer first asks: What am I angry about? He finds that aspect of society that heats his blood and goes on an assault.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“When we peek behind the grinning mask of comic cynicism, we find a frustrated idealist. The comic sensibility wants the world to be perfect, but when it looks around, it finds greed, corruption, lunacy. The result is an angry and depressed artist. If you doubt that, ask one over for dinner. Every host in Hollywood has made that mistake: "Let's invite some comedy writers to the party! That'll brighten things up." Sure...till the paramedics arrive.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“At Crisis the protagonist's willpower is most severely tested. As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take. We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we're surprised by its relative ease. We're left to wonder why we dreaded doing it until we realize that most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Crisis is the third of the five-part form. It means decision. Characters make spontaneous decisions each time they open their mouths to say "this" not "that." In each scene they make a decision to take one action rather than another. But Crisis with a capital C is the ultimate decision. The Chinese ideogram for Crisis is two terms: Danger/Opportunity - "danger" in that the wrong decision at this moment will lose forever what we want; "opportunity" in that the right choice will achieve our desire.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Pace begins in the screenplay. Cliche or not, we must control rhythm and tempo. It needn't be a symmetrical swelling of activity and shaving of scene lengths, but progressions must be shaped. For if we don't, the film editor will. And if to trim our sloppy work he cuts some of our favorite moments, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We're screenwriters, not refugees from the novel. Cinema is a unique art form. The screenwriter must master the aesthetics of motion pictures and create a screenplay that prepares the way for the artists who follow.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Once a transition of value creates an emotion, feeling comes into play. Although they're often mistaken for each other, feeling is not emotion. Emotion is a short-term experience that peaks and burns rapidly. Feeling is a long-term, pervasive, sentient background that colors whole days, weeks, even years of our lives. Indeed, a specific feeling often dominates a personality. Each of the core emotions in life - pleasure and pain - has many variations. So which particular negative or positive emotion will we experience? The answer is found in the feeling that surrounds it. For, like adding pigment to a pencil sketch or an orchestra to a melody, feeling makes emotion specific.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“An artist intent on creating works of lasting quality comes to realize that life isn't about subtle adjustments to stress, or hyper conflicts of master criminals with stolen nuclear devices holding cities for ransom. Life is about the ultimate questions of finding love and self-worth, of bringing serenity to inner chaos, of the titanic social inequities everywhere around us, of time running out. Life is conflict. That is its nature. The writer must decide where and how to orchestrate this struggle.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift points of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly. This omniscience forces them to become even more creative, more imaginative, and more insightful. Ultimately, they express what they deeply believe, but not until they have allowed themselves to weight each living issue and experience all its possibilities.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But 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.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small "t." Big "T" Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Ninety percent of all verbal expression has no filmic equivalent. “He’s been sitting there for a long time” can’t be photographed.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought. Self-expression is never an issue, for, wittingly or unwittingly, all stories, honest and dishonest, wise and foolish, faithfully mirror their maker, exposing his humanity … or lack of it.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“El peligro es el siguiente: cuando nuestra premisa es una idea que pensamos que debemos demostrar al mundo y diseñamos nuestro relato como un certificado irrechazable de esa idea, nos embarcamos en la didáctica. En nuestro afán por convencer reducimos el poder del otro lado. Utilizamos mal nuestro arte, y abusamos de él para sermonear, y así nuestros guiones se convierten en películas de tesis, en sermones vagamente disfrazados cuando intentamos convertir al mundo de una única pincelada.”
― Robert McKee, El guion. Sustancia, estructura, estilo y principios de la escritura de guiones