Literary Adaptation Quotes

When you're playing a character in a book, there's already a lot of pressure because all of the millions of people who have read the series have been able to envision and become very attached to the characters.

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.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to the book.

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

Shakespeare has been adapted by Akira Kurosawa. 'Dangerous Liaisons' has been adapted into a Chinese movie. 'Blood Simple', the Coen brothers movie, was adapted by Zhang Yimou.

It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.

It came right on the heels of A Room With A View. And that was such an enormous success, so I think people were hoping that Maurice would also have that kind of success.

If you ask me, I would love to see works like Sharat Chandra Chatterjee's 'Badi Didi,' Munshi Premchand's 'Nirmala,' and Phanishwar Nath Renu's 'Maila Anchal' come alive on small screen.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious.

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.

We're just like a movie based on a book-- almost, but not quite as good.

Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing.

Bob Wallace was my editor at Rolling Stone when I first started writing there, and he's a wonderful editor. I was in the Philippines during the Marcos overthrow, and I was up on what was called Smokey Mountain. I think it's gone now, but it was a garbage dump with a bunch of people living on it. I was talking to Bob on the phone, and I told him, "I'm a humorist. I can't write about this." And Bob told me to let my style be dictated by the subject, to take what I saw and write about it in the tone that it requires.

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

I adapted an O. Henry short story called 'By Courier,' which got nominated for a Best Short Subject Oscar.

Stephen King told me a long time ago, when he gave me some advice about the movies. He said to take the money up front and expect it to be something different than the book and if you don't like that don't deal with Hollywood. But if you take the money, shut up and don't criticize the film because you sold it. The movie doesn't change a word of the book.

You ever talk about a movie with someone that read the book? They're always so condescending. 'Ah, the book was much better than the movie.' Oh really? What I enjoyed about the movie: no reading.

My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

Only one time in my career I had that feeling [that this is not gonna get made], it was for this movie [Life of Pi]. It was right before we started the physical pre-production. I pre-visualized the whole ocean part before we made the movie, I was that prepared. At one point they seemed to want to drop it because it was really risky. The budget we proposed was a lot higher than they expected, they wanted to [drop it]. After all, it's a philosophical book and a literature property, it's not Batman.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

I've made movies that were adaptations and I've been kind of frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom, 'It's never as good as the book'? It's often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. When you're reading a book and you imagine something in your head, nothing's going to compete with that.

Novels are very different than films and I love to see someone else's imagining of my story.