Charlie Kaufman Quotes

Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure. And if you don’t risk failure, you’re never going to do anything that’s different from what you’ve already done or what somebody else has done.

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.

The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved.

The only way to do something interesting is not care if you fail.

I do throw out a lot of ideas, and I forget completely about them.

I like for people to figure things out for themselves. It’s not like I have the right answer, but if I have a visceral reaction to something, I’m sure that other people will, too.

The sad thing about working on a movie is that you can never see the movie.

I think now that I’ve tried directing, I’m not interested in doing adaptations anymore. I could do an adaptation of someone else’s work that I would write, but the idea of taking someone else’s material entirely doesn’t interest me. One of the things that I found really helpful, at least in my mind – and I’ve never discussed this with the actors or with the people I work with – is that being a neophyte in directing, I feel like I have a kind of authority simply because I’m the writer as well.

We’re all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories – and that’s the only way we can experience the world.

I’m interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It’s part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It’s where my head is.

I graduated from college in 1980.

You get a kind of surreal feeling and also it allows you to focus on the things we want you to focus on in a new way – the stuff that’s very small and mundane that happens in a person’s life when they’re in a hotel room. There’s more interest because you’re seeing a puppet do things that you’re very familiar with that you might not notice if it was a human doing it.