Literary Adaptations Quotes

From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.

My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

I knew David Benioff a bit socially. I knew his wife, Amanda Peet. He's a smart guy, so I always sought him out at dinner parties.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.

Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.

Am I overjoyed when somebody says, 'Oh, we're going to do another Jane Austen?' No - because there's never anything in it for me.

Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.

I didn't really watch action films growing up! I grew up on stuff like 'Anne of Green Gables' - that was more when I was in elementary school. It was all I ever watched.

Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work.

I've had nine of my books adapted to film, and almost all were enjoyable. I've been very lucky with Hollywood, and look forward to more movies being adapted. But I don't get involved in that process. I know nothing about making movies and I stay away from it and hope for the best.

One of the things the BBC does better than anyone is period drama.

I'm a big reader, so I tend to already know the books when they're adapted into something.

Because making movies is such an expensive endeavor, other media such as books and comics have long been a more feasible way to experiment with truly new ideas.

I really love period pieces.

'Little Women' made me into a reader.

There are many books that I love dearly, and I've seen many televised or film recreations that I just haven't thought were up to scratch.

I love Sherlock Holmes. There's still an awful lot to steal from Conan Doyle. But within a tradition you can work in many different ways.

Between the fictional Laura of the books and the even more heavily fictionalized girl of the TV show, we've tended to lose sight of the fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a real person who was complicated and intense.

I like period pieces.

I remain, however, fairly optimistic for the future of period drama because it's just such a popular thing.

I was never interested in writing novelizations. I'm still not. Especially not for 'Star Wars.'

I actually love Stephen King's writing. I mean, we, actually, at Castle Rock, we've made seven movies out of Stephen King books.

It was a period when live TV was just starting and getting popular and they took it seriously too. Not so much like TV now. They did Hemingway and Faulkner - and they’re all wonderful artists and it just was very creative at that time.