Charles R. Jackson Quotes

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

Sometimes I get to see a movie that's adapted from a book that I haven't heard about or that I love the movie so much that I will, of course, read the book.

If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.

You know what I loved about 'Sideways'? Well, the wine, of course. But it was one of the few movies in which being a writer was realistically depicted. I loved how the Paul Giamatti character tries so ineptly to talk about his book.

The best compliment came from Knopf's Sonny Mehta. We were at lunch in New York with my editor, Gary Fisketjon, it was my first time meeting Sonny, and after ordering our food, he turned to me and said, 'Adam, I read 'Mr. Peanut' in two days; every page surprised me, and that, I can assure you, doesn't happen often.'

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

I'm so grateful to everyone who has bought a copy of 'Girl Online.' I love that so many of my viewers are enjoying the book!

The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

The life of a bestselling novelist sounds like it ought to be spectacularly glamorous and fun, but in fact I spend most of my time incognito, and in fact were you to pass me in the street you would think I was just another dowdy suburban mom.

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.

God bless McNally, it's got some fantastic stuff in it, but it's no easy task to make a movie out of.

There's one great script that hit my desk that I didn't change at all, and that was True Romance.

I will be the first to admit that getting votes and getting an audience are two different things. For example, a politician really can't be elected if he's hated by half the people. A talk show host, however, can be an overwhelming national phenomenon while being hated by half the people.

The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.

To move up to hardcover is a way of getting more attention for my books. It means a lot to me: It means my books are legitimate.

In the '50s, '60s, '70s, before television became easily accessible, even the most well-known writers were not recognised. The writers remained mostly an anonymous lot then.

It's a very difficult thing to adapt a piece of existing material into film.

By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.