Charlie Kaufman Quotes

I have a lot of health anxiety.

I graduated from college in 1980.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

As a kid, I had a background in theater.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

You are what you love. Not what loves you.

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 t

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

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.