Story Quotes

“Porque los artistas no deben tener sólo ideas que expresar, sino ideas que demostrar. Expresar una idea, en el sentido de presentarla, nunca es suficiente. El público no debe únicamente entender; debe creer.”
― Robert McKee, El guion. Sustancia, estructura, estilo y principios de la escritura de guiones

“Si se reduce el número de espectadores, también se debe reducir el presupuesto. Ésa es la ley.”
― Robert McKee, El guion. Sustancia, estructura, estilo y principios de la escritura de guiones

“A rule says, “You must do it this way.” A principle says, “This works … and has through all remembered time.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, 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. These angry idealists, however, know that if they lecture the world about what a rotten place it is, no one will listen. But if they trivialize the exalted, pull the trousers down on snobbery, if they expose society for its tyranny, folly, and greed, and get people to laugh, then maybe things will change. Or balance. So God bless comedy writers. What would life be like without them?”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The art film’s focus on inner conflict draws the interest of those with advanced degrees, because the inner world is where the highly educated spend a large amount of time. Minimalists, however, often overestimate the appetite of even the most self-absorbed minds for a diet of nothing but inner conflict. Worse, they also overestimate their talent to express the unseeable on screen. By the same token, Hollywood’s action filmmakers underestimate the interest of their audience in character, thought, and feeling, and, worse, overestimate their ability to avoid Action genre clichés.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.”
― 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. To build a scene, we constantly break open these breaches in reality.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure to take one action or another in the pursuit of his desire.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Boy-meets-girl has always been an irreducible convention that occurs early in the telling, to be followed by the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of love.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The most important question we ask when writing a Love Story is: “What’s to stop them?” For where’s the story in a Love Story? Two people meet, fall in love, marry, raise a family, support each other till death do them part … what could be more boring than that?”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“There is no such thing as a portable story. An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Mastery of craft frees the subconscious.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“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: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“comic cynicism,”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting