Gene Luen Yang Quotes

I realise that a novel and a film are different mediums. As artistes, we need to respect other artistes. It also needs a lot of courage to take risks to experiment and interpret known literary works.

A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

Any time anyone makes a comic book into a movie, in some way, I think they have to kill the comic book.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

A script is only as good as the director who's making it.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie... Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

Any part I do is a marriage of the words - what the playwright or producer or show runner's vision is - to how I would play it. It took me a while to get rid of 'Oh, they want it this way, so I'm going to do it how they want it.'

I care a lot about who I'm working with as directors and other actors.

When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.

I would say my favorite is probably the 'Colder' video. Just because that sort of brings the album artwork to life. It's not my favorite song on the album, but visually, I think it just came out exactly how I had it in my head.

So many Hollywood adaptations of really popular manga series just don't get it right, and for me what was really important was that if I was gonna do 'Naruto,' I wanted to actually work with Kishimoto and get a script to a stage where he would look at it and be excited about realizing it.

As an author, it's a strange process to watch your novel turned into a movie. It's tremendously exciting but somewhat voyeuristic; after all, novelists are rarely involved in the process.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

When I'm working with an artist, my job is to make their vision come to life.

I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.

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.