Alice Hoffman Quotes

American novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer (b. 1952)

Alice Hoffman (born March 16, 1952) is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.

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I didn't believe in writers block until I had it. After 9/11 I couldn't write and the way I got out of it was to read one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury...(Why couldn't you write after 9/11?) AH: I was so depressed and hopeless about the state of the world. When I re-read Fahrenheit 451, a book about how important books are, I was reminded of the reason to write.

I think that I always wanted to tell the stories of women who were not able to tell their own stories.

I usually do start with setting. I try to build a fictional world, and then hope that the characters will walk into it.

I don't think it's a good idea to compare yourself to anyone. You are who you are and no one can write the way you do. I always want to tell that to young writers. The most important thing is to tell your story.

For me, magic is reading and writing.

It is clear when reading about the Holocaust that evil exists. But what was less apparent to me until I began to do research (for "The World That We Knew") was how much good there also is in the world.

For me—as I think it is for a lot of women and girls—I felt that they were figures that had power, and I felt very powerless," she said. "It was just very exciting and thrilling to think of a witch who didn't care if she was portrayed as ugly—which of course, I felt like I was—or not beautiful enough or whatever, but still had power and didn't need to be rescued.

When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be.

I think it's bad for writers to think too much about what their themes are, or to over-intellectualize their own work. I think it is much better for readers to think about that. They are not defensive, so they usually understand it at a different level, a purer level. I don't want to understand it too thoroughly. I just want to do it.

Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with.

The persecution of people who are different, whether it's women as witches, whether it's Jews, whoever it is, it always comes from the same place of being against anyone who's different. Fear of the other.

What you dream, you can grow.

She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse.