Charlie Kaufman Quotes

It took me a long time to figure out how to act, and how to conduct myself in the business so I could get what I felt I needed to support my potential and give them what they wanted.

You find it hard to deal with certain things and as you get older it becomes easier.

Education is the foundation of success. Just as scholastic skills are vitally important, so are financial skills and communication skills.

Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

In a huge way, everything that I've done in my life has helped inform my ability to communicate with actors and direct them.

In order to be able to cooperate with a child, you have to come down to below their level in order to communicate with them. Actors are also like children.

Each actor requires a different language.

Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.

If this is preparation for life, where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?

Why be so nasty and so rude, when I can be so fierce and so successful.

Your current situations or problems have been sent to you to teach you valuable lessons for success and happiness. What are they?

I never thought in terms of typing myself, because I wasn't that successful. After an actor has done a few pieces of work, his naïveté is the part of the craft he has to nurture most.

I want to be better at staying connected.

I think how I've gotten better, hopefully, at taking what I've got and being able to mish-mash something together, and as long as it feels real to me in the moment, then it feels like a success.

Successful people don't have any fewer problems than unsuccessful people; they just have a different mindset in dealing with them.

All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.

one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

I think talking's important. I think aspirations are critical.

If we've been a little more successful than other people, is because we always realised that the school of life was always open, and if you were not learning more you are falling behind.

It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.

I think as you mature as an actor things open up to you in a lot of ways, especially if you do work on yourself.

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

When you have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that's called 'success'. But once you have a new challenge, the old, once-successful response no longer works. That's why it is called a 'failure'.

The effectiveness of a group of people is not determined by their IQ but by how well they communicate.