Alice Hoffman, born 16 March 1952, is an American novelist best known for her novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism.
Quotes on writing:
- Books may well be the only true magic.
- No one knows how to write a novel until it’s been written.
- You can’t dispute the ridiculous. You can’t argue reasonably with evil.
- I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life.
- That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.
- After a while, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction.
- I’ve been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.
- All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them – much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.
- The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her – she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don’t.
- My theory is that everyone, at one time or another, has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who’s different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.