Don Winslow Quotes

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

Shane Salerno and I adapted my book Savages together, and I learned a lot about adaptation. I think it's an extremely difficult thing to do; adaptation might even be more difficult than writing an original screenplay. It's so much a matter of choices, making choices of what to leave in. It was an education.

The idea is in my head to put it down is nothing.

Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

Whether you're an actor, producer, writer, or director, it's all about the story you're going to tell.

I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.

Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

[Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns] is not just unique to books, but films and music.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Writing a book is an adventure.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

I think screenwriter Steve Kloves does such a difficult job. And he does a bloody brilliant job, too. Transferring these Harry Potter books into films and making them coherent is one thing. But making them entertaining, as well, is quite another... He does a tremendous job, and he gets a lot of stick. And it's really unfair sometimes, and I challenge anyone else to do the job he does.

So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.

I started writing as soon as I started reading.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

I like to be creative and I'm lucky that I have a couple of different outlets, and I'm lucky that I get to use them.

If you feel you have a film that's valid, you stick your ass on the line.

I've never adapted a book I didn't love.

As long as I'm creating, I am happy... whether directing, producing, writing, acting.

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.

Filmmaking is something that I'm really passionate about. Film, in general, is something that I'm passionate about.