Charlie Kaufman Quotes

People get excited about things like 'Swan Lake' because they generate a personal involvement. If you set up the story properly, audiences respond to the ambiguity. People ask, 'What exactly is happening in Act Four?' and I never say. I can't put it into words, but they've got a feeling about it, and that's good enough.

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

The audience is the camera. I don't want the audience to sit and watch, I want it to move.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

I don't really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it's all about finances, on one side.

The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.

Performance and music are inexorably tied together. And hell, I'll watch Brittany's Toxic music video all day. But there's a difference between that and listening to Leo Kottke play guitar. One is entertainment. The other is Music.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

Art should create an experience.