Alice Hoffman Quotes

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

The first song I wrote was called 'You,' and it was a love song about somebody who didn't even exist.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

You can't slot a time and a space and think 'ok now it's time to sit and compose.' It just doesn't work like that for me.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.