Kage Baker Quotes

The reason I wanted to do 'The First Men in the Moon' was that there is something so challenging in the combination of space travel and the Edwardian period.

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

Hope E. L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

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

I would like to see 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole adapted.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

It is a challenging task to adapt a book to screen presentation and you will not be able to satisfy those who read the classic novel.

I am very lucky: not very many writers can say they genuinely like the film of their book. However, I do.

I'm always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don't participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what's better, the book or the movie. So I think it's interesting when people want to do it.

It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called 'Rule Of The Bone.' I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.'

I've just had the opportunity to see the finished film of 'The Hunger Games.' I'm really happy with how it turned out. I feel like the book and the film are individual yet complementary pieces that enhance one another.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

Steampunk has been hovering around for a long while, and it's never really caught on in a big way.

I try to picture my books being acted out.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

The only good Philip K. Dick film is 'Total Recall.' It's faithful to the book. Arnie gets it.

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.

Remakes have been done forever. People talk about 'Scarface' and don't even know it was a remake.

When you're adapting a novel, there are always scenes taken out of the book, and no matter which scenes they are, it's always someone's favorite. As a screenwriter, you realize, 'Well, it doesn't work if you include everyone's favorite scenes.'

All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

Panned or not, 'Dune' is a real part of science-fiction filmmaking.

A friend of mine, Neil Gaiman, had the film rights to his book 'Stardust' bought by producer Matthew Vaughn and suggested I adapt it for the screen.