Charlie Kaufman

“Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn't be falling out. Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the...”

“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...”

“CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon. JOEL: I know. CLEMENTINE: What do we do? JOEL: Enjoy it.”

“I have a tendency to hire people who tend to be unattractive to the studios. Maybe this is a bad idea.”

“I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It's a very bad idea, and there's a lot of angry people in the world. And it's weird to absorb all that weirdness.”

“I have a personality that tends to be somewhat compulsive, and I do tend to think in a circular way. I dwell on the same things over and over and I try to figure out different ways of lookin...”

“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 lear...”

“It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't thin...”

“I'm not into extreme sports or something. I just live a quiet life.”

“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 sor...”

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

“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...”

“I want to try it to see what it's like and see what my stuff looks like when I take it from inception to completion.”

“I've had to deal, a lot, with my own sense of intimidation at meeting famous people - especially actors, but really any famous people.”

“I'm old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I w...”

“My time on the set is the least of my involvement. Most of my time is in pre-production and post-production.”

“I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.”

“I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.”

“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 don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.”