Original Text Quotes

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.

I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don't want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.

Shakespeare language is fantastic, and to be honest, you don't need to do anything to Shakespeare.

Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too. And another one replaced it, and that one is no longer the original text. These are questions that perturb me much more than whether it's history or not history.

Dear friends, whenever you want to understand a text of Scripture, try to read the original

I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation.

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

We're so used to seeing Agatha Christie's work on screen that going back to the original is a real joy.

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words.

The goal of Bible translation is be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.

I have one rule when adapting any text: nothing gets added; all the words are the original author's own. But in the ordering and recreation of the story, I can do as I please, and to me, the heart and the point of 'Dracula' is appetite.

I am going to have to stick to the script. If I muck around with the words it will defeat the object.

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.