Daily Inspiration Quote by John Simon

John Simon’s line is engineered like a put-down: tidy, proverbial, and just cruel enough to feel inevitable. The simile does the heavy lifting. Springs are supposed to be pure at the source, then muddied by distance and human handling. By borrowing that natural logic, Simon turns an aesthetic judgment into something that sounds like physics. An adaptation doesn’t merely risk getting worse; it is, in his framing, destined to.

The intent is less descriptive than disciplinary. Critics like Simon weren’t only reviewing individual productions; they were policing cultural metabolism: what gets recycled, what gets respected, what gets diluted for mass consumption. “Can only” is the blade. It rejects the possibility of translation-as-creation, the idea that moving a story across mediums can reveal new angles or improve weaknesses. In one stroke he delegitimizes the adapter’s ambition and preemptively flatters the original as the true “source.”

The subtext is a suspicion of the entertainment industry’s churn: Broadway-to-film, novel-to-series, prestige-to-product. Adaptation is framed not as interpretation but as downstream commerce, where complexity gets sanded down to fit a new audience, a new runtime, a new marketing hook. Simon’s cynicism also protects the critic’s authority: if decline is inevitable, then the critic’s job is to chronicle entropy, not to be surprised.

Context matters: Simon came up in a 20th-century critical culture that prized high taste and was openly skeptical of democratized media. Today, when adaptations can be daring reinventions, the quote reads less like a law of nature than a stance: a refusal to grant second lives the dignity of being their own art.