Alice Hoffman Quotes

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

As a novelist, you have to realise that the novel and the film have to live separate lives. They're just different, like your kids, even if they look alike.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

My novels are all ideas.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.