Charlie Kaufman Quotes
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I do like escapism. I like going to the movies on a Friday night and seeing something fun.
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I have a lot of health anxiety.
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I don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.
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I think I've had pretty good experiences for the most part with the people who have directed my screenplays.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes I don't like the books that I'm reading.
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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.
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Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.
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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.
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I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.
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I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.
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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.
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As a kid, I had a background in theater.
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I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.
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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.
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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.