Charlie Kaufman Quotes

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

Do not simplify. Do not worry about failure. Failure is a badge of honour. It means you risked failure. ~ Charlie Kaufman

There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it. ~ Charlie Kaufman

And so not only do you have to make that work, you can't really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you're waiting months and months and months before you can see if it's going to be working emotionally. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

I know Charlie Kaufman really well, for instance. Charlie Kaufman starts a story, and he has no freaking idea where he's going. None. Zero. And he doesn't want to know, because there's a little bit of death in that. ~ Stephen Gaghan

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

From my vantage point in writing a story, I can't and don't and have no interest in thinking about the level of sophistication of the audience. I can only think about what interests me, and maybe what I would want to see if I were watching the movie. To me, that's the key to writing something that's not pandering. ~ Charlie Kaufman

You spend most of your time as a director trying to move forward with the movie. It happens on a daily basis, if not more than once a day, that you are struggling with budgetary constraints. Whereas when you're writing, the limitation that you have is your imagination. So it's decidedly non-pragmatic. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Clem: Hide me somewhere deeper, somewhere really buried.
Joel: Where?
Clem: Hide me in your humiliation. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

I don't have a style. I wouldn't say I have a style as a writer, either. I know people have said "This is what he does," but when I'm writing, I don't think about that. I don't think about a style. ~ Charlie Kaufman

You realize you're not special, you've slowly slipped into existence and now you're slowly making your way out of it. ~ Charlie Kaufman.

I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

The world needs you. It doesn't need you at a party having read a book about how to appear smart at parties - these books exist, and they're tempting - but resist falling into that trap. The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, 'I don't know,' and being kind. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Sand is overrated. It's just tiny little rocks. ~ Charlie Kaufman

I do a lot of things intuitively. I'm not often consciously aware of what I'm doing. It's like in a dream: There's something going on that's powerful but you don't know exactly why. ~ Charlie Kaufman

KAUFMAN
Sir, what if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens, where people don't change, they don't have any epiphanies. They struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world -

MCKEE
The real world?

KAUFMAN
Yes, sir.

MCKEE
The real fucking world? First of all, you write a screenplay without Conflict or Crisis, you'll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There's genocide, war, corruption! Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it! For Christ's sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know CRAP about life! And WHY THE FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

KAUFMAN
Okay, thanks. ~ Charlie Kaufman

And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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? ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

There are rumors of rats down here as big as German shepherds, the people not the dogs. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Writing is a journey into the unknown. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Meet me in Montauk... ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

I'm interested in trying to explore what I think is the truth at a given time in my life, and part of the process of being honest is - in my mind - talking about the idea that you're watching a movie. You're sitting here watching a movie. And I like that. It appeals to me intellectually, and also in a way I can't even explain. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn't be falling out.
Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I'm a walking cliché.
I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There's something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I'm way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn't fat I would be happier. I wouldn't have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that's fooling anyone. Fat ass.
I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more, improve myself. What if I learned Russian or something? Or took up an instrument? I could speak Chinese. I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.
I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that?
Just be real. Confident. Isn't that what women are attracted to? Men don't have to be attractive. But that's not true. Especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days.
Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it's my brain chemistry. Maybe that's what's wron ~ Charlie Kaufman

I'm not a concept. Too many guys think I'm a concept or I complete them or I'm going to 'make them alive' ... but I'm just a fucked up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours. ~ Charlie Kaufman

I try to make things interesting and thought-provoking. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life. And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it. I don't have any bloody use for it. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie Kaufman: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald Kaufman: I remember that.
Charlie Kaufman: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at *me*. You didn't know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.
Donald Kaufman: What's up?
Charlie Kaufman: Thank you.
Donald Kaufman: For what? ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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.) ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

To begin ... To begin ... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

David Lynch is very important to me, and he does dreamlike movies, but my dreams are not like David Lynch's dreams. I have no interest in copying anybody's work. It would never occur to me to want this to look like someone else's thing. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

The difference between a movie and a play is that the production you end up with is the production. If a movie that I spent time on turns out to be crap, it's never going to be made again. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

You've been a part of me forever. Don't you know that? I breathe your name in every exhalation. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

What I came to understand is that change is not a choice, not for a species of plant, not for me. It happens, and you are different. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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

Every day of your life, you have information that enters your head, and that information informs your understanding of things, or shifts it, or changes it, or deepens it, or confuses you. Every day, every moment of every day - it's like this thing that happens. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

The passionate ones, the ones who go after what they want, may not get what they want, but they remain vital, in touch with themselves, and when they lie on their deathbeds, they have few regrets. ~ Charlie Kaufman

The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

CLAIRE
I used to be a baby!

CADAN
I'm sorry. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script. ~ Sam Rockwell

When you approach middle age, lots of stuff happens. Your body is aging, you're watching people around you get sick, you're watching people die, your mortality becomes very present at that point in your life. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

We are what we love, not what loves us. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

If I read something somebody wrote 300 years ago, and it's me, what I'm going through now in my head, it sends chills down my spine, and I feel like that's what I want to be able to offer - that if I offer myself, there's a chance somebody else will feel connected. ~ Charlie Kaufman

I choose to write characters from the inside because I feel like that's the way I'm gonna get the most honest version of them. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

I have a lot of health anxiety. ~ Charlie Kaufman

We're all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories - and that's the only way we can experience the world. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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

I really like when critics reveal their subjectivity and their humanity. I prefer it when people say nice things, but if they say not-nice things or things that are critical, I'm open to it and I accept it. I mean, I have to live with it. But I do think there's a dishonesty in not acknowledging that you're a person with an opinion. I think it's almost like a power grab. ~ Charlie Kaufman

I graduated from college in 1980. ~ Charlie Kaufman

[...] as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are...

Gone. ~ Charlie Kaufman

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process. ~ Charlie Kaufman

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

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. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Story ideas, but it's also musing on stuff that I'm thinking about. This leads me to this and this leads me to this. They're kind of random and haphazard. Often I can't find anything. Somehow, by doing that, even though I don't necessarily refer to them in a specific way, I have some sort of architecture in my head. ~ Charlie Kaufman