Quotes By Charlie Kaufman

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 have a lot of health anxiety.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

As a kid, I had a background in theater.

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

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 like actors - I used to be one.

I graduated from college in 1980.

I try to make things interesting and thought-provoking.

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.

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

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.