Quotes About Adaptation

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: 'No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.' My husband is a writer of crime novels. His name is William Gordon. And so I had to accommodate to his style because that's what he writes. So we decided we'd give it a try. Well, we almost divorced.

I don't like to work with directors who have taken an adoption from another script writer, because it's too much: one of them writes it and then has to explain it to the other, or maybe the director sees it in a way the writer doesn't want it.

We're not the kind of band that writes very well on the road.

When I'm writing film music, I feel like I'm more a filmmaker than a composer. It's more about what the film needs. I'm basically part of the team that's creating a film, and the music is a very important part, but it's just one part of many.

I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.

Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness.

Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.

Ravens aren't usually nocturnal, but hunger can be.

The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you'll be mistook for a mollusk.

Everything changes you, and you change everything.

There was no apology for the way the world worked. Only accommodation to it, while at the same time committing—somehow—not to give up.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

He had loved the girl who had loved the glamour in herself, and that girl seemed to have disappeared. But he was happy to have Glinda as a friend. Well, in a nutshell: he had loved Galinda and this now was Glinda. Someone he could no longer quite figure out. Case closed.

You might forget an event but you can never go back to living as you did before it's influence was applied upon you

By that token, you might forget an event, but you can never go back to living as you did before its hidden influence was applied upon you.

We are all migrants. We are exiled from the place where meaning meant something.

Every day you die a little and get a new chance to find out how next to live.

Your name is Rain, isn't it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can't you?

When a scarecrow blows apart in a gale wind, the farmer just props up another one. It's the job to be done that's important, not who does it.

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.

So the poor translator must not just go back and forth between two languages, but if he is worthy of his calling must shift between two selves, with all the perils of this induced schizophrenia.

I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar.