"McKee is the most widely known and respected screenwriting lecturer in the world today. His former students' accomplishments are unmatched: They have won 26 Academy Awards, 124 Emmy Awards, 20 Writers Guild of America Awards, and 17 Directors Guild of America Awards and even Pulitzer Prizes for writing. Some recent notable former students to win or be nominated for Oscars include Akiva Goldsman (Winner - Best Writing: Adapted Screenplay) for his screenplay "A Beautiful Mind," Peter Jackson (writer/director of "Lord of the Rings I and II", Nominated - Best Picture) and many others."

"The storyteller's selection and arrangements of events is his master metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of realilty - personal, political, environmental, spiritual. Stripped of its surface of chracterization and location, story structure reveals his personal cosmology, his insight into the deepest patterns and motivations for how and why things happen in this world - his map of life's hidden order."

"Flawed and forced storytelling is forced to substitute spectacle for substance, trickery for truth. Weak stories, desperate to hold audience attention, degenerate into multimillion-dollar razzle-dazzle demo reels. In Hollywood imagery becomes more and more extravagant, in Europe more and more decorative. The behavior of actors becomes more histrionic, more and more lewd, more and more violent. Music and sound effects become increasingly tumultuous. The total effect transnudes into the grotesque. A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When 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. If not, as Yeats warned, “…the center cannot hold.” —Mckee, Story

The final cause for the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, the meaning of justice, truth—the essential values. In decades past, writer and society more or less agreed on these questions, but more and more ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism—a great confusion of values. As the family disintegrates and sexual antagonisms rise, who, for example, feels he understands the nature of love? And how, if you do have a conviction, do you express it to an ever-more skeptical audience? —Mckee, Story

This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story. Unlike writers in the past, we can assume nothing. —Mckee, Story

Every decade or so, technical innovation spawns a swarm of ill-told movies, for the sole purpose of exploiting spectacle. —Mckee, Story

The art of story is in decay, and as Aristotle observed twenty-three hundred years ago, when storytelling goes bad, the result is decadence. —Mckee, Story