Charlie Kaufman Quotes

You are what you love. Not what loves you.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?

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

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

There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.

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

The end is built into the beginning.

I'm in my mind a lot. I live there.

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true.

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.

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

Meet me in Montauk.

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

Writing is a journey into the unknown.

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

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

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

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

She was nice. Nice is good.

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

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.

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

Scary is time passing and sickness and dying and regret and isolation and loneliness and relationship problems - as opposed to a guy in a hockey mask, which didn't seem that scary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I try to make things interesting and thought-provoking.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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