Explore Quotes by Charlie Kaufman

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.

I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.

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.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

I like titles that are a little difficult, because it's kind of counterintuitive.

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.

I don't subscribe to anything. I sit there and I try to think about what seems honest to me.

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

I do have, at different times, a certain kind of self-consciousness in the world, an insecurity.

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.

I do like escapism. I like going to the movies on a Friday night and seeing something fun.

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.

You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?

There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.

We're all one thing, like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.

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.

There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.

Sand is overrated. It's just tiny little rocks.