Robert McKee Art Quotations

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!

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

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

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

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.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

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.

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.