15 Illuminating Charlie Kaufman Quotes

1. “One of the biggest things about writing your first screenplay is that you actually finished a screenplay.”

2. “A screenplay is an exploration. It’s about the thing you don’t know. It’s a step into the abyss. It necessarily starts somewhere, anywhere; there is a starting point, but the rest is undetermined.”

3. “Don’t let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include or what form it must take. As an experiment, go out of your way to write a non-story. It will still be a story, but it will have a chance of being a different story. Our brains make stories. It is as basic to us as breathing.”

4. “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.”

5. “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.”

6. “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.”

7. “I couldn’t be who I was in show business as a writer if I wanted to be a director (…) I couldn’t be shy, I couldn’t be moody…My job here is to take care of other people, and therefore I have to be kinda steady.”

8. “It’s a good thing for me to be able to make my work even more personal – to take it from its conception to its completion and to be able to make all the choices myself. It maintains a certain integrity maybe that it might not otherwise have”

9. “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.”

10. “One speculates a lot on one’s failures (…) the only reason to speculate about bad box office is to decide that you don’t want to do something that you believe in next time in order to make more money — that’s not a choice I’m willing to make.”

11. “Failure is a badge of honour; it means you risked failure. If you don’t risk failure you’re never going to do anything that’s different than what you’ve already done, or what somebody else has done.”

12. “When I’m on my own and I’m doing something for myself, I don’t do an outline. I build it, little by little, as I’m working on it…I don’t know in advance how it’s going to end, I like to have the freedom to see where it goes.”

13. “I don’t subscribe to anything. I sit there and I try to think about what seems honest to me.”

14. “As a writer, or as a filmmaker, you have to present yourself, and part of what yourself is is what you’re interested in, or what you think is funny, or what you think is sad, or what you think is horrible.”

15. “I don’t have any lessons to impart (…) and I want to make sure I can’t.”

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