Charlie Kaufman

Sometimes there's no lesson. That's a lesson in itself.

Look for what is special about each individual, focus on that.

Always remember the customer is an individual. Just like you. Each person you speak to has had a day. Some of the days have been good, some bad, but they've all had one. Each person you speak to has had a childhood. Each has a body. Each body has aches. What is it to be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive?

I don't know. What is it to ache? I don't know. What is it to be alive? I don't know... Uh, yes. "How do I talk to a customer?" How do I talk to a customer? These are the important questions for a customer service representative. What do I say? Do I smile while I'm on the phone? Well, they can tell, if you're smiling, even if they can't see you. Did you know that? Try it as an experiment on the phone with a friend. Try it. Go ahead. Watch.

I'm lost.

See I was smiling when I said that? I've lost my love. She's an unmoored ship and she's drifting off to sea. I have no one to talk to. I have no one to talk to. I have no one to talk to. I'm sorry. I don't mean to burden you with that, I just don't know what else to do because I have no one to talk to… Be friendly to the customer. Think of the customer as a friend…

Our time is limited, we forget that.

Remember there is someone out there for everyone.

Each person you speak to has had a day, some other days have been good, some bad.

I think there's something very very wrong with me…

It's tragic how few people possess their souls before they die. Nothing is more rare in any man, says Emerson, than an act of his own. And it's quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. That's an Oscar Wilde quote.

Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope.

I'm thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. IIt sticks, it lingers, it dominates. There's not much I can do about it, trust me. It doesn't go away. It's there whether I like it or not. It's there when I eat, when I go to bed. It's there when I sleep. It's there when I wake up. It's always there. Always.

I haven't been thinking about it for long. The idea's new. But it feels old at the same time. When did it start? What if this thought wasn't conceived by me, but planted in my mind, pre-developed? Is an spoken idea unoriginal?

Maybe I've actually known all along. Maybe this is how it was always going to end. Jake once said, "Sometimes the thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought."

Coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not; whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you. Coming home is terribly lonely, so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness, because everything's worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return. Coming home is just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect, and made from a different material than those you left behind. You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth, returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots, seamy suit of clothes dishrag-ratty, worn. You return home moon-landed, foreign; the Earth's gravitational pull an effort now redoubled, dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead. You return home deepened, a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of… Anyway… You sigh into the onslaught of identical days. One might as well, at a time… Well… Anyway… You're back. The sun goes up and down like a tired whore, the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older. Nothing moves but the shifting tides of salt in your body. Your vision blears. You carry your weather with you, the big blue whale, a skeletal darkness. You come back with X-ray vision. Your eyes have become a hunger. You come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone. Everything you see now, all of it: bone.

It's hard to describe people. It was so long ago, I barely remember. I mean… We never even talked, is the truth. I'm not even sure I registered him. There's a lot of people. I was there with my girlfriend… We were celebrating our anniversary, stopped in for a drink, and then this guy kept looking at me. It's a nuisance. The occupational hazard of… of being a female. You can't even go for a drink. Always being looked at. He was a creeper! You know? And I remember thinking, I wish my boyfriend was here. Which is… That's sort of sad, that being a woman, the only way a guy leaves you alone is if you're with another guy. Like, if… like… like you've been claimed. Like you're property, even then. Anyway, I can't… I can't remember what he looks like. Why would I? Nothing happened. Maybe it was just… I think it was just… Just one of thousands of such non-interactions in my life. It's like asking me to describe a mosquito that bit me on an evening 40 years ago. Well, you haven't seen anyone fitting that description, have you?

Everything wants to live, Jake. Viruses are just one more example of everything. Even fake, crappy movie ideas want to live. Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. That's what makes them dangerous.

It's good to remind yourself the world is larger than the inside of your own head.

It's a uniquely human fantasy that things will get better, born perhaps of the uniquely human understanding that things will not.

Anything an environment makes you feel is about you, not the environment, right?

Youth is admirable? How can you admire a person for their age? It's like admiring a certain point in a stream.

People like to think of themselves as points moving through time, but I think it's probably the opposite.

That's misogynistic claptrap! Freudian bullshit! A person, an adult, has to, at one point or another, take responsibility for who they are.

Happiness in a family is as nuanced as unhappiness.

Seems. That's the operative word. Time's another thing that exists only in the brain.

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't

I know what to do with this play now. I have an idea. I think…

I know how to do it now. There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.

I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth. Brutal. Brutal. Each day I'll hand you a paper, it'll tell you what happened to you that day. You felt a lump in your breast. You looked at your wife and saw a stranger, et cetera.

All right, I'm not excusing myself from this either. I will have someone play me, to delve into the murky, cowardly depths of my lonely, fucked-up being. And he'll get notes too, and those notes will correspond to the notes I truly receive every day from my god! Get to work!

Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willie Loman thinks he's only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair. But the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor will end up in this very place of desolation.

I know how to do the play now. It will all take place over the course of one day. And that day will be the day before you died. That day was the happiest day of my life. Then I'll be able to live it forever. See you soon.

My father died. They said his body was riddled with cancer and that he didn't know, he went in because his finger hurt. They said he suffered horribly, and that he called out for me before he died. They said that he said he regretted his life. They said he said a lot of things, too many to recount, and they said it was the longest and the saddest deathbed speech any of them had ever heard.

I didn't jump, Sammy! A man stopped me before I jumped! Get up! I didn't jump.

Hazel, you've been a part of me forever. Don't you know that? I breathe your name in every exhalation.

I wish we had this when we were young. And all those years in between.

I don't think you should tell her she doesn't have blood...

What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this.

Walk.

As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are…

Gone.

Caden Cotard is a man already dead, living in a half-world between stasis and antistasis. Time is concentrated and chronology confused for him. Up until recently he has strived valiantly to make sense of his situation, but now he has turned to stone.

Now it is waiting and nobody cares. And when your wait is over this room will still exist and it will continue to hold shoes and dress and boxes and maybe someday another waiting person. And maybe not. The room doesn't care either.

Glad to be weirdly close.

You're 32 years old, and you've achieved nothing. Jesus Christ was dead and alive again by 33. You better get crackin'.

Think of it as a hobby. Something you do to relax. You're an "assassination enthusiast."

Okay. Let's see. Well, you had a twin sister, stillborn, strangled by your umbilical cord. Your first hit, Chuck. Your mother always wanted a daughter. She blamed you for your sister's death. And, so, until your sister Phoebe was born, she raised you as a girl. Oh, and your father the dentist? Not really your father. Your biological father was a man named Edmund James Windsor. A serial killer. A fact your mother didn't know when she had an affair with him in 1930. If you want to look him up, he was also known as the Tarrytown Troll, because he had been described by witnesses as short and ugly. Windsor died in the electrical chair at Ossining in 1939. We believed your self-loathing tendencies coupled with that extra Y chromosome and whatever else you inherited from your father would serve us well. I'm trying to think what more I can tell you, but you have me at a disadvantage here, Barris. I don't have your files in front of me.

He's a bad guy. He's one of the bad guys.

Don't fuckin' dance with me. Renda's bad for the Tea & Biscuit Company. He's bad for me personally. You work for me. Renda's bad for me... You're now officially a patriotic citizen of the United States of Jim Byrd. There's no backing out now. We let you in on everything. You don't play. You don't leave. You understand that? You don't play... You don't leave.

Okay, I'll help you out with your little show. Tit for tat. That's the kinda guy I am. I've seen this Dating Game of yours, Chuck. And I have a thought.

Hey, I'm John Q. Public when it comes to TV and that should make my opinion of interest to you.

Well, what do you have now? The couple gets sent to some stupid second-rate Hollywood shitcan restaurant, right? Sets you back fifty bucks? That's not too exciting a prize to us vicarious living boobs out in TV-land.

Up the stakes, Chuckles. Send 'em to some exotic locale. Europe, Southeast Asia, for example.

Send 'em with a chaperone.

I'm telling ya. And sometimes you can be the chaperone, Chuckie. Let's say we have a job for you in Austria. You, a successful TV producer, above suspicion, chaperones the young couple, and while you're there, you take care of some Com

Chuck, when I said you fit our profile, very little of that had to do with you needing the money. Some of it, but very little. You liked it with Renda, Chuck. I saw it in your eyes. You liked it but you botched it. Don't you want to get really good at something, Chuck?

You're gonna have to grow up. There's a war on.