William S. Burroughs Quotes

A lot of films that have been adapted from books stop serving you because they become different. I mean, they are different entities in themselves, but artistically, what you're trying to achieve with a film is so very different to what you're trying to achieve with a book, and the way when you write a script is so very different on paper to how it seems on a screen.

I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away - meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic but to find a cinematic equivalent.

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

I think one of the blessings that I've had in watching, you know, films be made now from four of my books is to realize that it's a separate thing. It's a separate work.

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.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

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.

Why did Ted Geisel end up writing and illustrating for young minds? He has specific imagery in the book, and we never would have moved beyond the discussion phase, if we couldn't have found an expression for The Lorax, dimensionally, that was true to the soul of what comes through in his simple line drawings, on the page.

I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

Yeah, when you're making a film, the book is a good tool, but once you have the script and you're making a movie, you have to let go of the book.

I think writing a book with film in mind is a way to write a really bad books. You can usually tell those books that are packaged to become films.

I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.

Whether it's films or painting or music or writing a book, the greatest experience is being able to express yourself and what you've gone through, trying to figure out a way to make it into something that's artistic that people can connect with.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else.

I look at the film without any music or sound. I try to grasp the story from the screenplay. I try to write to the novel or book if there is one. I try to create music that's honest and true to my heart for the story.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.