Charlie Kaufman's Quotes

I'm not a celebrity. I'm intentionally and defiantly not a celebrity. I don't have any interest in it. I don't have any talent for it. I keep my personal life out of my public life as cleanly as I can.

I'm old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.

I've kind of come to the conclusion that what passes for realism in movies has nothing to do with reality and that my stuff is more realistic than that.

If you create something that is asking for people to respond as they're going to respond, you have to allow them to respond as they're going to respond. Some of the people are going to be uninterested and some people are going to be mad for some reason, which is their business. That's just the way the world is.

In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they're not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It's a product.

It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't think of an exception to that.

The only honest and generous thing for me to do is to give people myself. That's all I've got as an artist, so I want to do that in an unflinching way.

The way I write is very much without kind of a goal. I have something I'm interested in and then I decide I'm going to explore it. I don't know where the characters are going to go, I don't know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that's the way to keep it alive.

There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

I think that people have expectations of themselves and other people that are based on these fictions that are presented to them as the way human life and relationships could be, in some sort of weird, ideal world, but they never are. So you're constantly being shown this garbage and you can't get there.

So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.

I do have, at different times, a certain kind of self-consciousness in the world, an insecurity.

You are what you love. Not what loves you.

I do like escapism. I like going to the movies on a Friday night and seeing something fun.

I hate a movie that will end by telling you that the first thing you should do is learn to love yourself. That is so insulting and condescending, and so meaningless. My characters don't learn to love each other or themselves.

I don't subscribe to anything. I sit there and I try to think about what seems honest to me.

I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.

I think generally I'm kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone's head, that being all they really know of the world.

As a kid, I had a background in theater.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.

I do throw out a lot of ideas, and I forget completely about them.

I don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.

I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.

I graduated from college in 1980.

I have a lot of health anxiety.

I have a tendency to hire people who tend to be unattractive to the studios. Maybe this is a bad idea.

I have ideas written down some places, but usually I can't find them. I'm not very organized.

I like actors - I used to be one.

I like titles that are a little difficult, because it's kind of counterintuitive.

I really don't have any solutions and I don't like movies that do.

I think I've had pretty good experiences for the most part with the people who have directed my screenplays.

I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.