Marriage Quote by Michael Chabon

The pain Chabon names here is the artist's version of breaking up with yourself. Novelists get to be gods: the prose voice is the engine, the texture, the point. Screenwriting, by contrast, is a team sport with a brutal rule: if it can't be seen or heard, it doesn't exist. So "divorce" isn't melodrama; it's craft reality. He's admitting that the part of his work he most identifies with - language as personality, the authorial mind on the page - has to be treated like scrap lumber.

The phrase "raw material" is the tell. It's not humility so much as self-defense. By demoting his own book from sacred object to inventory, he gives himself permission to cut, compress, and betray it. That betraying is essential because adaptation isn't translation; it's triage. Scenes that sing in a novel might be dead air on screen. Interior monologue becomes blocking, dialogue, silence, or disappears.

There's also a quiet flex in the pragmatism. Chabon isn't pining for fidelity; he's positioning himself as someone who understands the industry's grammar. The subtext: authors who cling to their sentences get steamrolled in development hell. He'd rather be the one holding the knife.

Context matters, too: Chabon's career sits in that late-20th/early-21st-century pipeline where literary prestige and Hollywood appetite started courting each other more openly. His quote captures the uneasy bargain at the center of that courtship: to be adapted is to be honored, and to be adapted well is to let your "best" parts get erased.