Book to Movie Quotes

I think I heard about 'The Giver' being made from when I was 11 or 12 years old. When I got the audition for this movie, I already knew that Meryl Streep was attached to it, and Jeff Bridges, obviously.

I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.

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

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.

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.

I've read every one of Donald Goines' books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.

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.

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

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

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

I do not mean for one second to suggest that 'White Doves at Morning' was written with a movie deal in mind. Certainly not.

With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.

I had read Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Namesake' and thought it would make a fabulous film, as I could identify with the central character. When Mira Nair announced the film, I wanted to do the role. When it fell into my lap, I was over the moon.

At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.

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

Every filmmaker knows that when you make a book into a movie, the first thing you have to do is kill the book, unfortunately. You've got to recreate it.

It's hard when you make a film from a book that so many people love, because there's no way to get the entire story into a two-hour movie. But I was pleased with the reaction [for Kite Runner].

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film."

Completely committed to adapting 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters.

I always feel I have made unfilmable books. I even felt that way about a book of mine that was later made into a movie. But my wife, who has made two films, thinks this one would make a very original film. I'm all for original films.

Essentially I feel like all of that pressure when you're making the first of a franchise of [movies based on] books that mean so much to people that has so much attention on it, it can be quite paralyzing I think. I think a lot of that creeped in the first time around and it maybe affects the work.

If I'm in the bookstore, and I see a 700-page novel, my first thought is, 'Ooh, how could you cut this down to size and make a movie out of it?'

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

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