Cain said it to the critic John Leonard, who visited him at home in Hyattsville, Maryland, for a piece in the New York Times Book Review of 2 March 1969. Quote Investigator ↗ transcribes the passage and names that article — “The Wish of James M. Cain”, quote page BR2, column 3 — as the earliest known appearance. Cain liked the answer enough to give it again, word for word, to The Paris Review eight years later.
“They Haven't Done Anything to My Book. It's Right There on the Shelf” James M. Cain, interviewed by John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review, 2 March 1969
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Provenance
The source
Article
“The Wish of James M. Cain”
Written by
John Leonard
Published in
The New York Times, Book Review section, 2 March 1969, p. BR2, col. 3
Said again
To The Paris Review, interviewed 7 January 1977, published 1978
There are some foods some people just don’t like. I just don’t like movies. People tell me, don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf. They paid me and that’s the end of it.
1969
Cain’s words as Quote Investigator ↗ transcribes them from the 1969 New York Times Book Review piece. The headline wording people search for — title-cased, two sentences — is a compression of the middle of this passage.
Quote Investigator’s investigation ↗ concludes: “based on current evidence this saying should be credited to James M. Cain”, and “There is no substantive support for ascribing the quotation to Chandler.”
The earliest citation QI gives is 1969 March 2, New York Times, Section: Book Review, The Wish of James M. Cain by John Leonard, Quote Page BR2, Column 3 (consulted via ProQuest, and located by the researcher Bill Mullins). We have not seen the newspaper page ourselves; the transcription above is QI’s.
QI corroborates the wording twice over: a 1974 book, Graham Greene: The Films of His Fiction, quotes Cain in phrasing that “matched the version in the New York Times”; and in the Paris Review interview of 7 January 1977 Cain gave “the exact same sequence of six sentences”.
QI also traces the wrong credit: William S. Burroughs attached the anecdote to Raymond Chandler in a September 1991 introduction, and David Cronenberg (1992) and Alan Moore (2001) followed him. QI calls that ascription “caused by confusion and… mistaken” ↗.
The words were spoken in 1969 and first printed in The New York Times Book Review of 2 March 1969. Nothing published in the United States from 1931 onward is public domain on age alone, so both that article and the Paris Review interview that repeats the passage are in copyright.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Often misattributed
The anecdote is good enough that it keeps getting reassigned to whichever novelist the teller has in mind. Only one of them is documented saying it.
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The usual wrong creditRaymond Chandler Unsupported
The Chandler version starts with William S. Burroughs’s September 1991 introduction to Everything Is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch, twenty-two years after Cain is on record saying it. QI ↗ finds “no substantive support” for it, and judges the ascription a confusion — helped along by the fact that Chandler co-wrote the screenplay of Cain’s Double Indemnity.
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Passed on byDavid Cronenberg (1992) and Alan Moore (2001) Repeated, not coined
Both retold it as a Chandler story, following Burroughs — Cronenberg at a Naked Lunch screening, Moore in an A.V. Club interview, per QI’s citations ↗.
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Other names it drifts ontoWilliam Faulkner and Elmore Leonard Unsupported
A 2010 magazine piece QI quotes ↗ names the author “variously identified as William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain”; a separate 2002 interview tells it about Elmore Leonard. Neither has a citation behind it.
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Told it correctlyStephen King Popularizer, not author
King has retold the anecdote at least twice — a 2006 Powell’s interview and a 2013 letter about Under the Dome — and both times he credited Cain, per QI ↗.
✓The line is Cain’s, said to a New York Times interviewer in 1969 and repeated unchanged to The Paris Review in 1977. QI’s trail ↗ is the account to read.
Context
Why it mattered
Cain had the most adapted body of work in American crime fiction and almost no interest in the adaptations. The remark is not a complaint about Hollywood — it is a refusal to be recruited into one. The reporter arrives with the grievance pre-packaged; Cain declines it and points at a shelf.
The last sentence is the one people drop, and it is the bluntest: They paid me and that’s the end of it. This is a working writer’s answer, not an aesthete’s.
The book is a physical object on a shelf. Whatever the film did, it did somewhere else.
Read the full story
It has become the standard thing for an author to say when a film of their book disappoints, which is why it has been handed to so many of them. Owen Sheers used a version of it in 2011; Larry Niven made the same point in 2003. The durable part is the logic: a film is a separate object, and it cannot reach back and alter the book.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
James M. Cain (1 July 1892 – 27 October 1977) wrote the hard, fast crime novels that Hollywood turned into some of the defining films of the 1940s: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce. He barely watched them. John Leonard reported in the New York Times in 1969 that Cain had seen only two of the films made from his books, and his standing answer to anyone who wanted him to be upset about it is the line on this page.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
John Leonard, “The Wish of James M. Cain,” The New York Times Book Review, 2 March 1969, BR2, col. 3. Repeated by Cain in “James M. Cain, The Art of Fiction No. 69,” The Paris Review (interviewed 7 January 1977, published 1978).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘They Haven't Done Anything to My Book. It's Right There on the Shelf’?” Last verified 28 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/they-havent-done-anything-to-my-book-its-right-there-on-the/