Charlie Kaufman Quotes

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

I have never written out of a desire to be controversial.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself.

For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see.

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

The past is full of examples of renegade writers who were overlooked in their time not only because their work didn't fit neatly into potted categories but also because they avoided the self-promotional efforts of their peers.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.

I wanted to make my sophomore film as different as possible. I didn't want to be pigeonholed. I didn't want to be identifiable.

I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.

I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact.

I am not bothered with whether my characters are conventional or not. Because I am not in this for the designer labels and the autographs.

I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.

What I don't like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

I spent the first part of my career trying to avoid genre because I felt like genre, in some way, was cliche.

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.