Quote this

I'm an avid collector of quotations. It must have started when I took an Effective Speaking extra-curricular course in the sixth grade. The leader was the now-late Mr. Leibovitch, and he held court every week in the gymnasium of our elementary school. I remember the electrifying feeling I got when I was on my game in front of a group of my peers. It was an early taste of a multifaceted literary exercise of the mind.

Every week, we'd have to prepare a speech on an assigned topic. I'd write them on cue cards and practice delivering them by forcing my long-suffering mother to stand in for the live audience. Every speech always had to have a quotation that somehow related to and supported the central theme. I became intimately acquainted with Bartlett's Book of Quotations that year, and the obsession has stuck with me ever since.

I'll be dropping them in here and there to keep things interesting and leave you with even more to ponder. This quote comes from Robert McKee, the character played by Brian Cox in the movie, Adaptation. The real Mr. McKee is a hard-driving screenwriting instructor profiled by a CNN reporter.

This quote stuck out as particularly relevant to my current existence. And likely to yours as well, since, at the core of it all, we are all storytellers:

"[A writer has] one responsibility: Tell the truth."