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For I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a war-time port. I do not know on which day it will sail, but I am ready to embark at a moment’s notice. I leave the sights of the city unvisited. I do not want to see the fine new speedway along which I shall never drive, nor the grand new theatre, with all its modern appliances, in which I shall never sit. I read the papers and flip the pages of a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon be parted. I am on the wing.
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Small print, big picture

Getting a book on the big screen is a hard enough task, so what chance of starting from scratch with the latter in mind?
In September 1994, Derek Hansen was an author in search of a movie deal. Setting out to write his third novel, Sole Survivor, he decided to do everything he could to make the book attractive to filmmakers.
His motivation was simple. A movie deal is an imprimatur. If you get a film made, it says it's a good book because there's a blind faith in movies. So I kept the cast small, set it in one location and made the props fairly minimal.
• Hansen was something of a river-dolphin. He enjoyed swimming in silty water and outwitting the crocodiles around him [The challenge was to ourselves not the Morava River iRiver drowned in the sea of ideas ]
• · Just as Hitchcock, Dreyer and Eisenstein in their bravest, most driven projects reached for cinema's unique selling point so, in Ten, did Kiarostami The whole point about cinema, surely, is the close-up of the human face
• · · See Also But though the book has been optioned for a movie and he is on top of the world, Jones lives a minimalist lifestyle
• · · · Any book publicist will tell you that it's easier to get press or broadcast coverage for non-fiction books because they come with pictures and flesh-and-blood characters: Making Room For Fiction ((Making Better BBC: The corporation’s programmes were not good enough and launched a major inquiry into how to improve them))
• · · · · Never a dull day, never a good night's sleep: Blaenavon, the small coal and iron town in South Wales, launched an audacious experiment - to build a new prosperity based on second-hand books in a post-industrial graveyard of dead jobs.... Town Of Books, Town Of Dreams
• · · · · · A Cold Serial With Your Hot Cereal: Minority Opinion: NYT To Serialize Fiction