Art & Creativity Quote by Katherine Dunn

Dunn’s line lands like a polite refusal wrapped in craft talk: yes, animation has improved, but no, that doesn’t mean the novel is now “ready” to be swallowed by the screen. The opening concession (“the animation has become very good”) nods to a familiar sales pitch - technology as destiny, fidelity as a technical problem we’ve finally solved. Dunn immediately pulls the rug out. The real issue isn’t whether movies can render the tentacles, the grotesques, the impossible. It’s that adaptation is often treated as translation when it’s actually substitution.

Her blunt pairing - “a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie” - is more than common sense; it’s a boundary line. The rhythm is almost childlike, which is part of the sting: the claim is so obvious it shouldn’t need defending, yet the culture keeps pretending otherwise. Dunn writes novels that depend on interiority, voice, and the reader’s complicity with the strange. Film, even at its best, externalizes. It turns language into image and private time into public pacing. A book can loiter in a sentence, make you reread, make you hear a narrator’s crooked intimacy. A movie has to keep moving.

The subtext is artistic sovereignty: don’t mistake improved tools for improved understanding. Dunn isn’t anti-film; she’s anti the idea that cinema is the “upgraded” endpoint of literature. Her statement insists on medium-specific dignity, and it quietly critiques the prestige economy where a novel becomes “real” only after it’s been greenlit.