Success Quote by Richard Schickel

Schickel’s line lands like a critic’s scalpel: it’s not anti-cinema so much as anti-mistake. He draws a hard border between what novels do best and what movies are tempted to substitute. A “great novel,” in his framing, isn’t primarily plot machinery or scenery; it’s a pressure chamber for consciousness. Characters don’t just act, they metabolize. They negotiate “inconvenient narratives” fate hands them - a sly phrase that demotes destiny from grand myth to unwanted itinerary. The real drama is the private bargaining: rationalizations, self-deceptions, small eruptions of insight.

Then comes the burn: adaptations become “exercises in interior decoration.” Schickel isn’t merely talking about production design. He’s naming a cultural habit: when filmmakers can’t translate interiority, they compensate with surfaces. Prestige becomes upholstery - tasteful, expensive, and emotionally inert. The subtext is a warning about how “fidelity” gets misread. Reproducing a novel’s houses, costumes, and period textures can look like respect while quietly evacuating the book’s actual engine: the lived mess of thought.

Context matters. Schickel spent decades as a prominent American film critic, watching Hollywood’s recurring cycle of literary acquisitions, awards-bait reverence, and flattening simplification. His complaint is less that film is shallow than that the industry often treats literature as brand IP: buy the monument, display it, light it well. What’s hardest to shoot - a mind in motion - is what makes the monument worth visiting.