Robin Hobb Quotes

I'm interested in adapting books and all sorts of things.

The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.

You want every movie to be a hit. But every painting isn’t a masterpiece.

As far as books getting turned into movies, I fared very, very well.

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. 'Field of Dreams,' however, caught the spirit and essence of 'Shoeless Joe' while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual.

As an author, you can't expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that's what you hope for, you shouldn't sell the rights.

I think one of the blessings that I've had in watching, you know, films be made now from four of my books is to realize that it's a separate thing. It's a separate work.

I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

Some people get their books on the best-seller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way.

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.

I think you are doing a disservice to a novel just by transposing it wholesale onto the screen, because it doesn't work. They are completely different beasts.

Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don't feel that way.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

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

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.

I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

A good adaptation of your book is worth it because it is such a wonderful experience to see your world translated onto the screen.

Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel.

Everyone thinks that Fight Club is a very important and successful film, but it was a massive box-office failure. Massive. It was a big flop by any commercial-release standard. And it's been a huge hit on DVD. Everything that movie has become has been on DVD. So you can't stake your sense of creative success on this whole box-office-performance matrix, because if you do, you're going to be disappointed most of the time.