A Quote by Ben Elton

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again! — © Ben Elton
My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!
The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.
To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.
Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, and read it until you understand it. Read 'King Lear,' and then read 'Othello.'
If I can give a young author any advice, whatsoever, never let anyone announce the film sale of your first novel. Film rights are sold to almost every novel, but it shouldn't be the lead story in your first engagement with the press. Then you end up getting reviews like "a novel made for the screen" and things like that.
Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lived. Bugs must be debugged. Changing requirements and the need for increased functionality mean the program itself may be modified on an ongoing basis. During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code. It is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer.
If anyone has read a lot of books and thinks I am primitive because I have not read even one, then he should throw away those books and get one which says we are all brothers and sisters under God and we too have a right to live.
When I'm working on something, if I went to an exhibition of an artist I respect, then I usually come home quite depressed and look at what I'm doing and throw it all away and start again.
If anyone stumbles then he must repent. If anyone errs then he must repent. And no one must insist on (the path of) destruction. If anyone insists on tyranny then he is far away from the path
Well, if you live long enough, you lose a lot. Just as long as you don't throw them away. Whatever you loose, you'll find again, but what you throw away you never get back. -Oibore (Enishi's dad) to Yahiko and Misao
Cinema is a director's medium, so you're saying, 'What do you want?' Being an actor is about adapting - physically and emotionally. If that means you have to look great for it and they can make you look great, then thank you. And if you have to have everything washed away, then I'm willing to do that too.
Cinema is a director's medium, so you're saying, "What do you want?" Being an actor is about adapting - physically and emotionally. If that means you have to look great for it and they can make you look great, then thank you. And if you have to have everything washed away, then I'm willing to do that too.
I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel.
Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.
To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over...
Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.
I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.
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