Art & Creativity Quote by Katherine Dunn

There’s a sly toughness hiding inside that seemingly gracious word: flattering. Dunn is describing the book-to-film relationship the way a seasoned writer describes an ex who “borrowed” your best stories. A director, she suggests, doesn’t adapt so much as appropriate: the novel becomes a “launching pad,” useful not for fidelity but for lift. That metaphor matters. A launching pad is infrastructure, not the destination; it’s necessary, then quickly left behind once the rocket clears the tower. For a novelist whose work is built on voice, texture, and moral weirdness, the implication is clear: the thing you actually wrote is the first casualty of the process.

The phrase “you have to acknowledge though” is Dunn doing social choreography. She’s anticipating the common complaint - filmmakers butcher books - and preemptively disarming it with pragmatism. This is what happens; complaining won’t change the physics of the industry. Yet the concession also reads like a boundary: if you want an adaptation, you don’t get to demand obedience.

Contextually, this reflects the modern hierarchy of cultural translation, where cinema is treated as the megaphone and literature as source material, a quarry for plots. Dunn doesn’t romanticize it, but she also refuses the posture of victimhood. Calling it “always very flattering” is both diplomatic and barbed: yes, it’s nice to be wanted; it’s also telling that what’s wanted is permission to make something else. The subtext is professional self-defense: hold onto your authorship by admitting, out loud, that adaptation is reinvention, not tribute.