Charlie Kaufman Quotes

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth--it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

We're all building our narratives in our heads.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

What you think is real is your reality.

Be skeptical, but not as a social position, not claiming to be so intelligent that you cannot believe what other people say. It's not about being right and making everybody else wrong. No, you are skeptical because you know without a doubt that everybody lives in their own story, and in their story they have their own truth. But it's only truth in their mind, just as your truth is only truth in your mind, and nobody else's.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

Think of every character as a main character. They believe they're the main characters in their stories. No one should just be an obstacle.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

You gotta tell the story the way that it happened to you and the way you experienced it.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

Separate the story - your story - from facts.

We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then 'see' the world through the self we have created.