243 Quotes by Charlie Kaufman

When I’m writing, I’m trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that’s how life is lived, you know?

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

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 know that as a very young child, I was afraid of death. Many children become aware of the notion of death early and it can be a very troubling thing. We’re all in this continuum: I’m this age now, and if I live long enough I’ll be that age. I was 20 once, I was 10, I was 4. People who are 20 now will be 50 one day. They don’t know that! They know it in the abstract, but they don’t know it. I’d like them to know it, because I think it gives you compassion.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don’t like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people’s ability to understand something if I say it’s “about this.” That’s happened to us a bunch on this.

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.

And so not only do you have to make that work, you can’t really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you’re waiting months and months and months before you can see if it’s going to be working emotionally.

I just try to be honest, because I think that’s part of my job description as a writer.