Top 22 Alice Hoffman Quotes

I don’t really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don’t want to get into someone else’s language when I’m working.

All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them – much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.

No one knows how to write a novel until it’s been written.

They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I’m interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women’s stories are all kind of combined.

I can’t really work on more than one thing at a time.

I don’t think I make much of a distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic.’ They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.

Any institution becomes a community – whether it’s a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.

Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.

After a while, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction.

The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her – she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don’t.

You can try to take sorrow and make it into something enduring, meaningful and beautiful. I always feel guilty that this is my job, that I get to do this.

Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you’re gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.

It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman’s domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

Even in times when it’s difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art – and books – always help.

Anyway, the sort of love that will not wait is probably best to pass by.

I never see a novel as a film while I’m writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I’m such an internal novelist.

Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it – the information just disappears out of my head.

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life.

I did go there later, but I hadn’t been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

I think growing up is difficult and it’s a process that I’m always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.