Art & Creativity Quote by Iain Banks

Banks is pointing at the uneasy trade every novelist makes with visibility: a book is intimate property until the camera arrives, then it becomes public infrastructure. The first sentence frames authorship as a kind of sovereignty. An unadapted novel is "entirely yours" not just legally but imaginatively; the reader’s private act of reading still happens inside the architecture the writer designed. Even disagreement feels contained by the text.

Then the second sentence flips the power dynamic with a blunt metric: scale. Film doesn’t merely translate; it reallocates cultural ownership. The people who "see it" outnumber those who ever read it, which means the definitive version in the collective mind is no longer the book’s language but the movie’s faces, soundtrack, pacing, and marketing. A character stops being a voice and becomes an actor’s cheekbones. A scene stops being ambiguous and becomes literal.

Banks, a writer with work constantly hovered over by adaptation talk, is also diagnosing a modern attention economy. Books are slow, solitary, and selective; cinema (and by extension TV) is social, memetic, and repeatable. The subtext is not anti-film snobbery so much as a sober warning: adaptation is a form of success that can feel like dispossession. Your story survives, but it survives as something more shareable and less yours. The irony is that this loss is purchased with the one thing writers are told to want most: more people.