Alice Hoffman Quotes

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.

A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.

I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

We all have our own little thing, I think.

I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

A man is known by the books he reads.

Unfortunately, I'm not a history buff. I don't read biographies, except of some of those writers whom I've collected over the years - particularly Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, people like Charles Bukowski and John Fante and David Foster Wallace.

My reading preferences are kind of all over the board - I read nonfiction, I read graphic novels.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

I wasn't interested in the kinds of books that I thought I should be reading.

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

I really like looking at other people's book collections when I'm at someone's house. I think it is an amazing cross section of a person's brain and lifestyle. I think everyone should photograph their book spines and make a website. Seriously.

I do not care about my own appearance, but I would hope that people could see into my soul, and that is presented better in these photographs than in others. (On his self-portraits)

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

People who know and love the same books as you, have the road map to your soul.

I don't think Trump reads. If he does, my guess is he's reading autobiographies of ... I wonder if he's read Mein Kampf.

I'm familiar with the Palestinian mentality, the culture, religion, and when I had information coming in on a daily basis: secrets about personal lives, politicians, what they are hiding from their society that most people don't see, I started to see the picture in a different way.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

I think some people who go into public life, if they go in needing the applause of thousands, they're never going to work out successfully in the end, because they don't know who they are apart from the crowds.

I kiss people with my soul. I don't kiss them with my mouth.