Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Russo

Russo is puncturing a fantasy a lot of readers secretly cling to: that a “faithful” adaptation is basically a word-for-word transfer, like literature with subtitles. As a working novelist, he knows the book’s real power usually lives in things that don’t travel cleanly between forms - interiority, rhythm, digressions, the slow accrual of meaning across pages. When he says fidelity to the spirit often requires betrayal of the text, he’s treating “spirit” as the book’s governing intelligence: tone, moral pressure, the emotional contract with the reader. Text is the surface artifact of that intelligence, not the thing itself.

The subtext is a defense of translation as creation, not clerical labor. “You have to make changes” isn’t a shrug; it’s an assertion of responsibility. Adaptation is full of temptations to cosplay the original - keep the famous lines, preserve scenes like museum pieces - and Russo is arguing that this kind of reverence can kill what people actually loved. A novel can afford to linger in ambiguity; film and TV demand visible choices. A chapter-long memory becomes a glance, a line of dialogue becomes silence, a composite character replaces three minor ones. Those aren’t degradations; they’re equivalents, crafted for a different medium’s physics.

Contextually, Russo’s also speaking into a culture war around adaptations, where “faithful” is wielded like a purity test. He flips the premise: real loyalty isn’t to the letter. It’s to the effect. If the adaptation makes you feel the same unease, tenderness, or bite the book delivered, it’s done the only kind of faithful work that matters.