Art & Creativity Quote by Iain Banks

Banks’s jab lands because it flatters and insults two art forms at once, then leaves you to notice you nodded along. “By the usual reckoning” is doing sly work: it frames the claim as received wisdom, not personal vendetta, as if we’ve all quietly observed the same perverse law of adaptation. The kicker is the inversion. We’re trained to assume prestige flows downhill from great novels to respectable films; Banks flips that hierarchy and, in doing so, pokes at how different the mediums actually are.

The subtext is less “books are bad” than “cinema needs different fuel.” A “worst” book, by literary standards, is often one with blunt characterization, overdetermined plot, broad emotions, and set-piece scenes - exactly the stuff that becomes clean scaffolding for a screenwriter and a director. Thin prose and obvious psychology don’t survive close reading, but they translate into images, beats, and momentum. Meanwhile, the “best” books tend to be interior, language-driven, structurally odd, or dependent on voice; strip away the sentences and you’ve gutted the point.

Context matters with Banks: he moved between mainstream fiction and science fiction, worlds that are perpetually being “optioned,” misunderstood, simplified. The line reads like a veteran’s defense mechanism against the adaptation-industrial complex: a reminder that fidelity isn’t virtue, and that disappointment is often baked into the mismatch. It’s also a backhanded compliment to film as its own craft - not literature with a camera, but an engine that runs best on visualizable bones, not verbal magic.