Charlie Kaufman Quotes

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.

I'm the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

I think you have to write what you want to watch.

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I try to avoid describing one interpretation of my books. Of course I have an opinion. I have things I want to say, but I don't ever want to limit anybody, to have them say, 'Oh, he said this, so that's what it's about.' I'm happy people bring their own stuff to it.

Yeah, in my scripts, I don't tend to describe landscape too clearly because I like to keep it really basic and sort of let people paint their own picture. I don't find it helpful to spend a page describing a setting, except for maybe a few key things.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

I write what I write.