Love & Passion Quote by Brian Lumley

There is a hard-earned superstition in Lumley’s line: speak of a film adaptation and you jinx it. Calling “talking too much” the “kiss of death” frames Hollywood not as a meritocracy of ideas but as a terrain of fragile momentum, where projects die from exposure long before they’re shot. The phrase is pungent, a little fatalistic, and deliberately unsentimental. It’s also craft advice disguised as aphorism: protect the work from the churn of premature commentary.

Lumley’s background matters. As a genre writer whose worlds (notably in horror) are vivid, fan-loved, and adaptation-friendly on paper, he’s lived in the long shadow of “development.” Writers learn that movies are often less an outcome than a conversation industry: announcements, option deals, producer attachments, casting rumors. That talk can become the product, satisfying the public appetite for progress while quietly replacing progress itself. In that context, silence isn’t modesty; it’s self-defense.

The second sentence, “If it happens then it happens,” is a shrug with teeth. It rejects the performative optimism creators are often expected to sell, especially when courting studios or fanbases. Subtext: don’t make the work hostage to the promise of a bigger platform; don’t let a hypothetical film validate (or invalidate) the book. Lumley isn’t romanticizing art over commerce so much as refusing to be emotionally managed by commerce’s timelines. The appeal is its cool realism: a veteran’s refusal to confuse possibility with a plan.