A Quote by Bo Burnham

I write about what I know: teenage dating, overly charged sexuality, all the things that make you uncomfortable. — © Bo Burnham
I write about what I know: teenage dating, overly charged sexuality, all the things that make you uncomfortable.
. . . the whole idea of WHAT HAPPENED WAS.... is not about dating. It is more about people who are not committed to who they are or are indifferent about their life in general, which is how I felt about myself when I wrote it. I had turned 40 and I was unhappy and I wanted to write about that. Dating just became the framework. . . . I like all those fringy, weird, nonverbal, quiet, tiny little things, those powerful interchanges between people, things that go unsaid, that people know are happening all the time but nobody wants to talk about. That's what I want to make movies about.
I think it's important to be authentic but also be able to have fun and not be overly controlling or insecure. Dating is just one of those things where it's kind of when you know, you know. I have been really busy with my career and sometimes I find it hard to juggle the two.
It's what I do well - I write about things that make people uncomfortable. That's probably the only thing I do better than my peers.
What's more interesting are the dynamics between people that involve hypocrisy or ignoring each other. That's what I want to write about. I like to make people uncomfortable because it's something we should be uncomfortable about.
More than once at TechCrunch, we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we'd write a post about the whole thing.
I wasn't raised to not write about issues, and I'm just living in really politically charged times. You know, I'd rather write songs about girls, but it's just hard to do right now.
I think something that happens when you grow a bit older is you become slightly less overly emotional. Obviously when you're young or a more progressed teenager, you're overly emotional, so that side of me calmed down. I wanted to write more about stories, and other things that I'd observed and seen or done.
People try to be more edgy, or write about that first explosive meeting between two people in a club, but not so much the long-term issues; I don't know how to write a song about teenage heartbreak anymore.
I think mental illness is a slippery slope to talk about these days because people are overly diagnosed, overly prescribed, overly everything.
The visual can seduce you, leading to false deductions, and ultimately, even the finest ideas can be reduced. Take for example, sexuality. If it is reduced down to the moment and to pleasure, things like that, that's not what sexuality is all about. Sexuality was to be in tandem with the sacred, not amputated from it.
The community in Utah was very religious. I was a typical teenage girl trying to find my sexuality. Unfortunately, girls do use their sexuality to find attention. I also understand why parents want to protect their kids.
I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.
Sexuality is a topic that has huge shifts in -society. Attitudes toward different sexualities change, but the actual sexuality of a human being is something that's consistent, and it's consistently interesting, and so people write about it.
What I'm asserting is that we are looking at bisexuality the wrong way, making the identity entirely dependent on someone other that the bisexual person him- or herself. If I'm dating a man, I'm straight. If I'm dating a woman, I'm a lesbian. But sexuality is not who you sleep with, it's who you are. It doesn't change according to who is standing next to you.
At the [teenage] time, I did have an inkling of my sexuality. And I had an inkling that I was different from other people in ways beyond my sexuality. But I didn't get into music because I thought, Oh, these people will understand me.
I definitely write about things that are universal, that everyone can identify with. You're supposed to write about things you're passionate about and I guess I am a foodie. I do love food and it's kind of like I'm an eccentric observationalist guy. To make it kind of universal, I try a lot of different things. When I first started writing this, I was like, 'No food.' Then, you know, it just always goes there.
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