Adaptation Failure Quotes

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.

He who refuses to learn deserves extinction.

'The Golden Compass' became a bad experience because the studio didn't have faith in the strength of the ideas of the novel, which is ironic because it's one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written, if not the greatest, and they took the religion out of it and tried to turn it into a popcorn movie.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

The annals of business are filled with stories of companies that thought they had it made and could milk their enterprises without having to bother about improving their products or services. It's amazing how fast they found their markets disappearing.

I'm the world's greatest apologist for Brian De Palma but his version of Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia' is a disaster.

What I learned in jail is that I can't change. I can't live a different lifestyle - this is it. This is the life that they gave and this is the life that I made.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

I can never accomplish what I want - only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.

The Titanic hit the iceberg not because they could not see it coming but because they could not change direction.

The church that will not give up will be outdated and passed by, quicker than they realize.

Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book.

If you like the book, you'll hate the movie.

The way Hollywood works, you're never sure if their first thought is to make a great film and honor the material or just another business property.

In '48 when I left Metro, I tried to go back to radio, but somehow just didn't do well at it.

The chicken had his wish, and was magically transformed into a fox. Then he found that he could not digest grain.

Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel's fans, and blighted my reputation forever.

I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.

Obviously there's a lot more to a TV show than just a book... I think adaptations are a bit tricky for the screenwriters because they're worried about upsetting the author.

The movie adaptations of stage musicals that I've seen, without exception, in my opinion don't work. A lot of people would disagree with me.

It seems that the one thing that doesn't change is people's reaction to short-term conditions and their axiomatic ability to perpetuate them far into the future.

People are usually so disappointed with book-to-movie translations.