Alice Hoffman Quotes

Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.

The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Robert Frost: plain, strong, simple, and mean.

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

I think one of the reasons Stephen King's stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from.

McCarthy's prose in 'Blood Meridian' comes blazing from the Book of Revelation.

Fitzgerald was a modernist.

Puritan standards have become the public standards of America, and you will find more of New England in Colorado Springs, Boulder, or Greeley than in most towns of Massachusetts.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

Edgar Allan Poe is amazing because he was so dark. He's from Baltimore and so cynical that you can feel it when you're reading, it feels so honest.

I would definitely agree that 'The Witch' doesn't leave much of anything to the imagination. There are some ambiguities about 'The Witch,' for sure, but all in all, it's pretty clear what's going on.

I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it.

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

Eastern Connecticut is very different from Western; we're more liverwurst than pâté, more bowling than polo.