Susanna Clarke Quotes

A lot of period pieces we see are adaptations of novels - we always know the story.

I remember, when I was a teenager, 'Pride And Prejudice' came out. We hadn't had a period drama for ages, and were all glued to it, and for the next three years, Jane Austen series were being made.

I went back to Australia to do a show called 'The Beautiful Lie,' which is a retelling of 'Anna Karenina' in a six-part mini-series - a modern, contemporary version.

'Game of Thrones' is taking dense novels and trying to shrink it all down to a slightly manageable series in the sense that there are so many characters and so many locations.

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

I like Daniel Craig. I worked with him on 'Sharpe,' one of the very early ones, maybe the second one we did - 'Sharpe's Revenge?' A long, long time ago, and he was good in that then.

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

Because [writers] Dan Weiss and David Benioff have done such a great job in adapting them, that's what we work with. It serves no purpose to anybody for actors to come onto a set with a well-thumbed copy of the source material and start querying why this or that line has been left out of the script. It's probably been left out for a good reason.

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.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

We wrote 'Olive Kitteridge' as six hours, and they asked us to make it in four.

People have been trying to make a two-hour feature film of 'Outlander' for years and years and years.

I do like 'Game of Thrones.' I really like it.

As a fan, when I hear that a film is going to be turned into a television show, I do go to that place immediately of, 'Is it going to be any good? Is it going to be a waste of time? Why are they doing it?' It's '12 Monkeys,' and '12 Monkeys' is awesome, so I wanted to be a part of it and work on it.

Whenever we start a new TV series, there's also a lot of question marks, and part of that is finding who you are.

I kind of muddled through 'Pride & Prejudice,' but with 'Atonement,' I knew what I was doing. That makes it sound like I had no doubt. I had doubts - I didn't know whether it would work. But I knew exactly what I wanted to try to do.

The thing that was most harmful was that there was always something that was about to happen. So I found myself indulging in the writer's luxury of doing another draft, another idea. If this project isn't happening, then I'll shelve one script and start writing another. And in that way, the years go by, and there's very little money coming in.

We've seen from shows like 'Game of Thrones' that the book can become a seed, which you plant in the ground of great TV creators, and it can sprout out into a big tree.

After so many attempts to mount a musical version of 'Lolita,' the project was well and truly dead by the summer of 1971. Chief among those relieved: Vladimir Nabokov.

Period drama is such a huge umbrella term: it seems to cover everything from Claudius to something from the 1920s.

I watched 'Downton Abbey' twice, and I'm thinking of watching it for a third time. It is so good!

'Gossip Girl' was an adaptation that, although very different from a Marvel property, had a vocal fan base. On that show, we started off very nervous about making any changes from the book. As we got our sea legs underneath us, we became more bold.

I am greatly impressed with the BBC's TV adaption of Charles Dickens' 'Bleak House.' The costumes, the sets, the acting and the screenplay are all superb. Every episode is riveting.

When a movie based on a book comes out, people always say that the book is always better than the movie. So I'm always interested in reading the book, too.

I love period dramas - be it romance or philosophy.