Paul Auster Quotes

I don't think there ever will be a biopic on me! I would much like some of my books to be made into films.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

I've done a gazillion readings that have gone on to be movies that are made without me.

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

I think a lot of writers are unrealistic about having their books translated into film.

I never thought 'The Glass Castle' would be a movie. It's just too complicated.

Film rights were in the offing for 'The Onion Field,' eventually made into a movie in 1979; 'The New Centurions' became a 1972 film starring George C. Scott, while 'The Blue Knight' starred William Holden in a 1973 mini-series version.

Unless any book is selling 30 million copies, like 'Fifty Shades of Grey' did, the big studios are not going to make movies out of them because the cost is too high.

An author entices the readers with their words, and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw 'Anna Karenina' on screen, I didn't like it at all, whereas 'The Godfather' was legendary.

I even knew some of the dialogue but it was definitely cool to look at. We always argue that the movies should be loyal but in this case I could argue that it might have been too loyal.

These properties that get made into movies, some are easier than others. When they first said, 'Yeah, they're making a movie out of Lego,' I said, 'Lego what? What does that even mean?' And it's such a good concept.

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 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.

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.

'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

I would like to see 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole adapted.

I'm not sure my books would translate into movies very easily. So rather than have someone do a terrible job, I haven't been willing to sell them.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.

A friend of mine, Neil Gaiman, had the film rights to his book 'Stardust' bought by producer Matthew Vaughn and suggested I adapt it for the screen.

Many years ago, I was a producer on a movie called 'My Dog Skip.' Willie Morris, the great southern writer, had written the book. We had adapted it and taken 17 years of his life and compressed it into one year.

Lots of movies don't kind of work as well as they do on the page.