Charlie Kaufman Quotations

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.

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

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.

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

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

I can talk endlessly about characters, or why someone did this or that, and what that dynamic and interaction is. I really love it, and I think that actors really respond positively to the fact that I like to talk about that stuff, because I'm not sure that all directors do.

I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.

You are what you love. Not what loves you.

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?

I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.

There's no way to approach anything in an objective way. We're completely subjective; our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings, as men or women, by our age, our history, our profession, by the state of the world.

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 want to try it to see what it's like and see what my stuff looks like when I take it from inception to completion.

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.

As a writer, or as a filmmaker, you have to present yourself, and part of what yourself is is what you're interested in, or what you think is funny, or what you think is sad, or what you think is horrible.

I have a personality that tends to be somewhat compulsive, and I do tend to think in a circular way. I dwell on the same things over and over and I try to figure out different ways of looking at the same issue.

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.

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

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

I'm not into extreme sports or something. I just live a quiet life.

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 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.

I've had to deal, a lot, with my own sense of intimidation at meeting famous people - especially actors, but really any famous people.

My time on the set is the least of my involvement. Most of my time is in pre-production and post-production.

There is so much crap in the world, both in show and other businesses, that I try to be vulnerable myself, in the hopes that there is some truth I can get to, that makes people feel less alone in the world.

As I'm writing, I start to see connections, and themes I didn't see, and that sparks other things. So then I go back and rewrite things or alter them. It's a combination of intuition and a lot of finessing. It becomes a combination of the rational and the irrational.

I often have a theme in mind when I'm starting. I know that I want everything to be in a world of, say, evolution, or guilt.

I love working with actors. I love visual things. I always intended to be a writer who directs and a director who writes.

There are so many people who are making movies now who can't get any kind of distribution, so the market seems like it's flooded.

When I'm writing a script, before I can write dialogue or anything, I have two or three hundred pages of notes, which takes me a year. So, it's not like "what happens next." I've got things that I'm thinking about but I don't settle on them. And if I try to write dialogue before then, I can't. It's just garbage.

It's good when someone comes to a book or a movie and interacts with it. It's the difference between an illustration and a painting. An illustration serves a specific purpose, and a painting is something you can immerse yourself in.

I'm Jewish, and my family is Jewish. I was very interested in Woody Allen when I was growing up, but I don't think of myself as a Jewish writer. I'm more from suburbia, American suburbia. I'm more from the '70s than I am from Judaism.

I try to present something that is true so I don't further destroy the world with my contribution to it.

I just try to be honest, because I think that's part of my job description as a writer.

There are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. This is a movie about health and about the body.

I like for people to figure things out for themselves. It's not like I have the right answer, but if I have a visceral reaction to something, I'm sure that other people will, too.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

I want to do my own thing, and I'm trying to get closer to realizing that as a filmmaker.

I like actors - I used to be one.

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'm moving - as a person and as a writer - through time. I'm a different age. I'm thinking about different things. I have different life experiences. I'm trying to get closer to being honest. And by closer I mean that at different ages I have different ideas of what the truth is, and at any point I'm trying to express that at that moment in time.

Sand is overrated. It's just tiny little rocks.

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.

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.

You're dealing with the body, and you're dealing with bodily functions. We romanticize everything about people in movies.

Directing is a more pragmatic experience, where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don't have to make when you're writing.

Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.

I try when I'm writing to leave enough "space" for people to have their own interpretation, and not to direct it toward one conclusion. Then the audience would not be reacting, because they are being preached to or lectured at. I don't have that much to say that I think people should listen to me.

There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.

I know that as a very young child, I was afraid of death. Many children become aware of the notion of death early and it can be a very troubling thing. We're all in this continuum: I'm this age now, and if I live long enough I'll be that age. I was 20 once, I was 10, I was 4. People who are 20 now will be 50 one day. They don't know that! They know it in the abstract, but they don't know it. I'd like them to know it, because I think it gives you compassion.

I spend a lot of time in preproduction working with authors, and a lot of time in postproduction.: editing, music, all that sort of stuff. Casting. On the set there's not a lot for me to do.

Seriously, I don't consider myself a writer. I don't think I have writing talent. But I will continue to do it.

The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved.

She was nice. Nice is good.

I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. We romanticize everything about people in movies. One of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things.

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

Why do I fall in love with every woman I see that shows me the least bit of attention?

clementine: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon. Joel: I know Clementine: What do we do? Joel: Enjoy it.

Meet me in Montauk...

There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.

My point of view comes more from the literature I've read and the comedy of the era. When I was a kid, coming across National Lampoon Magazine, that was a big thing. I suddenly felt like there were other people that felt the way I did, and there was a way of expressing and communicating this worldview.

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

There's a point I can get to where I start writing character and then through the dialogue, after all of this preparation, the thing starts to feel like it's a character developing through the dialogue. A lot of character traits do come from writing dialogue, but I have to be ready to do it.

I don't think I've had a lonely moment in my life.

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

As a kid, I had a background in theater.

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

You get a kind of surreal feeling and also it allows you to focus on the things we want you to focus on in a new way - the stuff that's very small and mundane that happens in a person's life when they're in a hotel room. There's more interest because you're seeing a puppet do things that you're very familiar with that you might not notice if it was a human doing it.

I think if something resonates, even if it's surreal, it's because it is relatable and I think that that's a core issue for me.

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

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

And also the idea of not making it apparent that it's different from the rest of the film, even though there are visual differences, the audience is supposed to think that they are with him when he wakes up in the morning.

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

I have a lot of health anxiety.

I graduated from college in 1980.

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

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't.

The sad thing about working on a movie is that you can never see the movie.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys, and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing cryptographic operations. (They are also large, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and they pollute the environment. It is astonishing that these devices continue to be manufactured and deployed. But they are sufficiently pervasive that we must design our protocols around their limitations.)

There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.

Yeah, once we decided to use that replacement animation, and the seams are a function of that animation, and other movies paint those out, we decided we wanted to keep the presence of the animation and the type of animation that it was rather than make it look polished. It created a kind of vulnerability, I think.

I try to make things interesting and thought-provoking.

I'm trying to tell a story and do it truthfully.

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

The biggest thing that I came across, right off the bat, was that you can't shoot this like a regular movie with multiple takes. You have to, because it's such a protracted process, break it down to the frame and pretty much get one shot.

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

I wanted to deal with someone's idea of their relationship.

And then to see the whole movie, you're pretty much waiting until the end of production. And the major lifting in terms of editing and all that stuff is done before you shoot the movie. That's an unusual way to work.

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.

Sometimes I don't like the books that I'm reading.

The only way to do something interesting is not care if you fail.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It's a very bad idea, and there's a lot of angry people in the world. And it's weird to absorb all that weirdness.

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won't be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.

I want to create situations that give people something to think about.

I studied acting at Boston University. I was in the theater department there. Somewhere in there I decided that wasn't what I was going to do and I went to the B.F.A. film program at N.Y.U.

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.