Mckee Quotes & Sayings

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time. — Robert McKee

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. — Robert McKee

Asking a consumer about his opinion of your advertising is like asking a deer about the best way to hunt it. — Steve McKee

Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, — Robert McKee

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

I am a little crazy but when I'm on-stage, then I really get to play it up and perform and be over the top and it's like an outlet. It's fun to 'wild' out. — Bonnie McKee

Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer's labor goes into designing the story 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. — 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

I made a list of things I wanted to do with my life, but it ended up mostly being a list of books I wanted to write — Ellie Rose McKee

It's amazing how, over the course of one's life, you collect so much music you don't like, so many movies you don't watch and so many books you have no intention of reading. If only regret stopped with the trivial things such as these. — Ellie Rose McKee

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee

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

Influence is just persuasion in slow motion. — Robert McKee

A chief cause of worry and unhappiness in life is trading what we want most for what we want at the moment. — Maralee McKee

Where I grew up in the North-east, the community there, and the way people relate to one another, goes very deep. But I don't define myself as a Northerner in that I don't live in the North. — Gina McKee

I'd like to go the Cher route and act and sing and write and have a TV show and do it all. — Bonnie McKee

Things are not exactly going to plan. — Suzanne Young

The dirty secret of art is you don't have to show people your bad writing. That's what we have the delete key for. — Robert McKee

As he chooses, he is. — Robert McKee

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

Life is chaotic and meaningless, and you have to find your meaning. You must find the answer, you can't just live. That's the point of story: helping you find your meaning in life. — Robert McKee

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant. — Robert McKee

The way football is being played currently, that I have seen, it's dangerous. It's dangerous and it could impact their long-term mental health. You only get one brain. — Ann McKee

Sometimes you just gotta suck at being the person people think you are. — Ellie Rose McKee

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

When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit! — Robert McKee

A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations ... four or maybe five generations. — Gina McKee

To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist's responsibility. Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence. — Robert McKee

I think you should aim for the stars - and hopefully avoid ending up in the clouds! — Roxanne McKee

Most of us have been touched deeply by a few important people: people who, because of their feelings for us and their actions, have helped us to become who we are today. Some of what these special people gave to us was uplifting and inspiring. Sometimes what they gave to us caused pain and only made sense later. Who has been a very special person in your life? Who has shaped you and helped you to be who you are today? Write a letter to this person. Tell the person what he or she has done for you, the impact the person has had, and your feelings about how he or she has touched you. Be as honest and authentic as possible. Write from your heart. You may decide later to send this letter, but this first version should be for you. — Annie McKee

I've had two instances when I've met journalists face to face and we've had good interviews and I've said, 'We don't have children, by the way,' and then they've written it. I'm not sure what that's about. As misleading facts go, it's not a terrible one but it isn't true - we don't have kids. — Gina McKee

the French First Army near Speyer and Strasbourg. The preparations were pitifully inadequate and the losses heavy, but the objective, which was political and not military, was gained. This was to establish a French "presence" over the Rhine inside Germany, as a bargaining counter for the post-war period. Important though this was for France, it was a minor matter compared to forestalling the Soviet on the Baltic at the gateway to Scandinavia, the ultimate objective of 21st Army Group's stage-managed crossing and the only one with a vital political aim as the prize. It was also the most critical as regards the time factor. Eisenhower was unique in his insistence on "broad front" policies of advance. The Russians were not sweeping into Europe on a broad front, with all the armies keeping step; instead, they were making their main drive for the politically most vital objectives - Berlin and the gateways — Alexander 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

Ke$ha is super talented and super fun and always down to party - I love that girl. — Bonnie McKee

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

Every time I work with Dr. Luke I learn something new. He's kind of like the Andy Warhol of pop music, where he mass produces his art but it always still has heart and always still has an emotional thread to it. I think he's really a genius and I'm so lucky to have gotten to work with him. — Bonnie McKee

To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write. — Robert McKee

Wisdom is knowing the right path to take. Integrity is taking it. — M.H. McKee

Creatures stalking each other over time grew a bond from mind to mind. — Suzy McKee Charnas

Classical design is a mirror of the human mind. It's how we see the world. — Robert McKee

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

Stories build cultures by answering the big questions. — Robert McKee

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. — Robert McKee

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

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

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

I started writing my own songs from the time I was a little kid. I would write my own lyrics to other people's songs that I heard on the radio and take whatever song and make it about fairies and angels - whatever little girls sing about. — Bonnie McKee

The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails. — Robert McKee

I will know that I am using my skills in X, Y, and Z to make a real, significant contribution to boost our company's growth/market share/profit and I will feel excited and happy about that. — Peggy McKee

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse. — Robert McKee

If I know I will be working with someone and they are not keen with writing with a girl, I like to be non-threatening and cool so they will trust me. It's a thought process of who work and how I want to present myself. — Bonnie McKee

Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. — Robert McKee

The mark of a master is to select only a few moments, but give us a lifetime. — Robert McKee

The first time I came to London on my own, I was 15. I was absolutely oblivious to so many things. I had no expectations, no fears. I just came to do a National Youth Theatre season one summer. It was just brilliant. — Gina McKee

For those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desire are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite. — Robert McKee

My instinct is probably one of the strongest assets I've got, workwise. — Gina McKee

McKee's a genius. And hillarious. You'll like him, too, Charles. He's all for originality, just like you.
He says that we have to realize that we all write in a genre and we must find our originality within that genre.
As it turns out, there hasn't been a new genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary.

My genre's thriller, what's yours? — Donald Kaufman

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

We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery. — Robert McKee

Mastery of craft frees the subconscious. — Robert McKee

My mum certainly isn't a prude, nor is my brother, so I think I'm lucky to have a family like that. — Roxanne McKee

I think it's nice to be able to make a product, put it out there and let other people decide what they think. — Gina McKee

Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression. — Robert McKee

OUCH

"The arrabal (a term used for poor neighbourhoods in Argentina and Uruguay) and carpa (informal mobile theatre set up inside tents, once common in Latin America), with their caliente (hot) rhythms such as the rumba or the cha-cha-cha, were conquering audiences all over the world, a trend allegorised in song lyrics about their popularity among the French and other non-Latin Americans - "The Frenchman has fun like this/as does the German/and the Irishman has a ball/as does even the Muslim" ("Cachita") - even as they filtered in the presence of a blackness - "and if you want to dance/look for your Cachita/and tell her "Come on negrita"/let's dance" - denied in the official discourse of those Spanish=speaking countries wielding the greatest economic power in the region: namely, Argentina and Mexico, the latter of which would eventually incorporate Afro-Latin American culture into its cinema - although being careful to mark it as Cuban and not Mexican. — Robert McKee Irwin

When I moved to Seattle in fourth grade, I joined the Seattle Girls' Choir. It's a world-class choir, and we competed, toured Europe, and went and sang at the Vatican, so it was a really awesome experience to have that young. — Bonnie McKee

It's just funny that anybody would care at all to take apart the words that I write. It's kind of cool! — Bonnie McKee

The universal erosion of values has lead to the universal erosion of story. — Robert McKee

Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work. — Robert McKee

of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional. — Robert McKee

I was writing songs as a kid about leprechauns and Catwoman and teapots - whatever it is that little girls wanna sing about. The first song I wrote was called "Kitten." It was about a boy named Liam, who I was just crazy about. — Bonnie 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

Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks fall away, faces become vulnerable, receptive. Filmgoers do not defend their emotions, rather they open to the storyteller in ways even their lovers never know, welcoming laughter, tears, terror, rage, compassion, passion, love, hate
the ritual often exhausts them. — Robert McKee

The National Youth Theatre did one very simple but incredible thing for me: it made me realise I had choices. — Gina McKee

There's a way of negotiating how you portray your private life publicly that I've never had the skill to do. — Gina McKee

Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
Of course you cannot keep a wife-
Everyone's got to live their life! — Kristen McKee

I think what it means to be an 'American Girl,' and what I wrote the song about, is our freedoms. The idea that we as Americans can be what we want to be and say what we want to say and that we take it for granted. — Bonnie McKee

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

I think the difference between a good song and a great song is ... honestly, I think the lyrics, because if you have a really solid melody and solid track and everything is there but then the lyric is just okay, then you've got a good song. — Bonnie McKee

There are some artists that don't like working with other females, which is fine. They have their own thing. I personally love being surrounded by other females. — Bonnie McKee

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good.
And when she was "bad",
Her Papa loved her anyway. — Kristen McKee

There's a feeling that you get when you write songs where ... it feels like it's destined to do something. Then sometimes you get that feeling with a song and it never goes anywhere, that happens all the time too, so you never really know. — Bonnie McKee

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her dear dog a bone.
Though the cupboard was bare,
When she focused elsewhere
Her heart overflowed with fun! — Kristen McKee

I'd live in Glasgow if I could. I can't praise it enough; it's the nicest place I have ever worked and I've worked in a lot of nice places. — Roxanne McKee

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. — Robert McKee

I'm extremely self-critical. Although I try not to be ridiculous about it, wearing horsehair shirts and all that. It's a private exercise I don't necessarily share with other people. — Gina McKee

I can be nostalgic for the past, and I can romanticize the future, but I cannot sugar coat the here and now. I think that's why I try not to think about it, and I think that's the exact same reason why I need to. — Ellie Rose McKee

You may think you know, but you don't know you know until you can write it down. Research is not daydreaming. Explore your past, relive it, then write it down. In your head it's only memory, but written down it becomes working knowledge. Now with the bile of fear in your belly, write an honest, one-of-a-kind scene. — Robert McKee

I like to go to the movies at The Hollywood Forever Cemetery. They do this thing in The Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood where everybody sits out on the grass and they project movies and it's very romantic and very old-school Hollywood, so I love that. — Bonnie McKee

I've been close friends with Katy since teenagers, before she was Katy Perry. She's always been a great resource for me to pull from and watch - from her choice of how public she wants to be about her personal life on down. I also watched her develop from the coffee-house singer-songwriter I knew to her be to playing arenas and killing it. — Bonnie McKee

Eavesdrop on any coffee shop conversation and you'll realize in a heartbeat you'd never put that slush onscreen. Real conversation is full of awkward pauses, poor word choices and phrasing, non sequiturs, pointless repetitions; it seldom makes a point or achieves closure. But that's okay because conversation isn't about making points or achieving closure. It's what psychologists call "keeping the channel open." Talk is how we develop and change relationships. — Robert McKee

Aristotle said time is a measure of change, and this movie is about changing in time, through time, while remaining the same person. That's a philosophical paradox and a moral dilemma. But 'Casablanca' says it's possible. You can have both. That's what it means. And that's my wish for you: that you would have both. — Robert McKee

I saw Tina Turner do 'Proud Mary' on TV, and it was so electrifying and such a unique experience. I remember crying out of excitement, and I knew that I wanted to be a performer and make people feel excited and moved, and that's why I gravitated towards it. — Bonnie McKee

I was one of those kids who found it difficult to eat anything that looked like an animal. — Gina McKee

I would love to do anything involving a good strong character, whether it's in film, TV or theatre. My dream role's already been taken by Keira Knightley in 'Pride and Prejudice.' Growing up, I really wanted to be Lizzie Bennett. — Roxanne McKee

Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing. — Robert McKee

I don't feel comfortable talking about my private life, and some people in my private life don't feel comfortable about me talking about it. So I don't. — Gina McKee

A lot of people, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and a lot of people have written for other people, and of course Bruno Mars. So I think it's a great way to break into the industry and show people what you can do and show them your talent and people tend to listen a little differently to your own music as an artist, when you've proven yourself as a good songwriter for other artists. — Bonnie McKee

I've been singing since I could talk, pretty much. My dad was really musical and taught me how to sing harmonies and got me a karaoke machine with tape decks. — Bonnie McKee

I was always super, super musical. So my parents recognized that and put me in choirs, piano lessons, and all that. — Bonnie McKee

Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations. — Robert McKee