Charlie Kaufman Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm constantly trying to find something that's different from me, whereas some actors do the same thing, again and again. That's not for me.
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About the most exciting thing a baby can do is burp - I've spent hours of my life holding a baby on my shoulder and patting its back, trying to loosen up a burp. Burping was probably invented to give the father something positive to do, since our chests are not equipped to allow us to do much else.
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The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.
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If I hadn't spent many years trying to be as compassionate as Mother Teresa, as positive a thinker as W. Clement Stone, as prolific a writer as Stephen King, and as good a speaker as many of the legends I have studied, I would not be as successful as I am today.
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Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone.
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Mr. Norrell is like a librarian trying to do magic... That's the story of my career, really. I stand next to good looking men and make them look better!
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With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.
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If you're trying to understand why it is that certain things happen in Sacramento and certain things don't, at the end of the day, it comes down to the issue of incentives: We do what we're incentivized to do.
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You take so much on as a therapist: you just sit there and listen to people talk with you, and you're trying to help people, and it can be draining.
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If we're going to go really deep, we're all trying to live forever. My music is my way of doing that.
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I'm not trying to be the next Dave Grohl or Phil Collins.
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You're trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a 'memory before the game. I don't know if you'd call it visualising or dreaming, but I've always done it, my whole life.
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It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.
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There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.
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I get in trouble when I say things like, 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.
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When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.
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I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card, and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.
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Basically, we are a whole world of people desperately trying to figure out what is the dark side of our natures and how much can we explore without becoming something else.
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A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
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I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?
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I auditioned equally for film and theater. The difference is that theater has seasons, while film, it's always happening.
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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.
