Mordicai Gerstein Quotes

If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.

You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms.

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

When people say "How do you write a book, how does it all happen?" I say, you line things up, and you line them up as actually as you possibly can, but sooner or later the book has got momentum and it's moving along under that momentum. It's like a sculpture, if you're working with the grain of the wood, the wood will start defining what shape it's going to become.

I always write with images. I cannot write a book if I don't have images.

Personally I don't think there's any real intrinsic difference between comic books, movies, theatre, novels. I know there's sure to be some differences of some sorts. I've worked on novels, films, and video games, and in an adaptation, I guess one of the issues is that I have to be in love with the thing I'm adapting before I do it. So that can cause a problem. You can be too scared of it. You could be too reverential. But at the same time you want to try to capture this thing that you're obsessed by. You're fixated for a reason. What's the reason? You try to get ahold of it.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

Movies are different from books and you need to be open to go into that difference.

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

I begin each book with a challenge to myself.

When you do your first book, you're just like, "This is my work." And it's just this whole other world that you throw yourself into.

I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody.

I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.

Not everybody can do the comic book adaptation thing and make it believable. It is challenging.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

Books are almost always better than the movies made from them, because there are things books do well and things movies do well, but usually those things don't overlap: the same with comics and animation.

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.