Art & Creativity Quote by Joseph Wambaugh

What looks like a mild craft note is really a declaration of control. Joseph Wambaugh - a writer whose career has lived at the intersection of reportage, crime fiction, and Hollywood - frames adaptation not as a dutiful translation but as a pleasure: "I enjoy". The word is doing heavy lifting. It signals that adaptation, for him, is less a compromise with another medium than a second draft with higher stakes, where pacing, tone, and audience are re-negotiated under different rules.

The slyest move is the pivot from "my own work" to "anybody's work". That casual expansion reads like confidence bordering on provocation. Wambaugh is saying: stories are malleable, and I trust my instincts enough to put my hands on someone else's material without reverence. In a culture that treats books as sacred objects and films as corrupting machines, he shrugs off the hierarchy. A book is not a shrine; it's raw material.

"I like to adapt books" also hints at his lineage as a novelist of institutions - cops, departments, systems. Adaptation is institutional storytelling: you take a thick, interior form (a novel) and make it operational on screen, where character must be action and subtext must be behavior. Coming from a writer associated with gritty realism, the intent feels pragmatic: the best way to protect a story's truth is to re-engineer it yourself, before producers do it for you.

Underneath the breeziness sits a professional truth about authorship in the media ecosystem: if you don't adapt, you get adapted.