Robert McKee Quotes

To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.

To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

It's always fun to do something that you know ultimately is not about the money, and it's certainly not for the fame - because it's a pain in the ass. But it's really the person in the theater seat you think about when you sit in a room and write.

Anything works, as long as you write it properly.

Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.

There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we're here [on this planet].

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.

I'm very comfortable writing.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

Disorganizatio n is the enemy of good writing.

You can't be a good writer without being a good thinker.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.

Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together.

The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.

It's easy to write something average or even something good. But writing well is quite challenging.

You have to be able to communicate in life and probably schools underemphasize that. If you can't talk to people or write, you're giving up your potential.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.