Quotes from Charlie Kaufman

Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won't be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can't help but be that. But more importantly, if you're honest about who you are, you'll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.

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.

Meet me in Montauk...

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

Writing is a journey into the unknown.

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

We are what we love, not what loves us.

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true.

She was nice. Nice is good.

What is love anyway? From my new vantage point, I realize that love is nothing more than a messy conglomeration of need, desperation, fear of death and insecurity about penis size.

You've been a part of me forever. Don't you know that? I breathe your name in every exhalation.

What I came to understand is that change is not a choice, not for a species of plant, not for me. It happens, and you are different.

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.

Clem: Hide me somewhere deeper, somewhere really buried. Joel: Where? Clem: Hide me in your humiliation.

To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin.

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.

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

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 have ideas written down some places, but usually I can't find them. I'm not very organized.

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.

There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they're not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It's a product.

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.